Rethinking Educational Leadership: Challenging the Conventions (Published in association with the British Educational Leadership and Management Society)

Rethinking Educational Leadership s

n o i t n e v n o ing the C

Challeng

Nigel Bennett & Lesley Anderson

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Rethinking Educational Leadership

Published in Association with the British Educational Leadership, Management and Administration Society This series of books published for BELMAS aims to be directly relevant to the concerns and professional development needs of emergent leaders and experienced leaders in schools. The series editors are Professor Harry Tomlinson, Leeds Metropolitian University and Dr Hugh Busher, School of Education, University of Leicester. Titles include: Developing Educational Leadership: Using Evidence for Policy and Practice (2003) Edited by Lesley Anderson & Nigel Bennett Performance Management in Education: Improving Practice (2002) Jenny Reeves, Pauline Smith, Harry Tomlinson and Christine Ford Strategic Management for School Development: Leading your School’s Improvement Strategy (2002) Brian Fidler Subject Leadership and School Improvement (2000) Hugh Busher and Alma Harris with Christine Wise Living Headship: Values and Vision (1999) Edited by Harry Tomlinson School Culture (1999) Edited by Jon Prosser School Improvement After Inspection? School and LEA Responses (1998) Edited by Peter Earley Policy, Leadership and Professional Knowledge in Education (1998) Edited by Michael Strain, Bill Dennison, Janet Ouston and Valerie Hall Managing Continuous Professional Development in Schools (1997) Edited by Harry Tomlinson Choices for Self-managing Schools: Autonomy and Accountability (1997) Edited by Brian Fidler, Sheila Russell and Tim Simkins

Rethinking Educational Leadership Challenging the Conventions

Edited by

Nigel Bennett and Lesley Anderson

SAGE Publications London • Thousand Oaks • New Delhi

Introduction and editorial material © Nigel Bennett and Lesley Anderson 2003 Chapter 1 © J. Tim Goddard 2003 Chapter 2 © Rodney T. Ogawa 2003 Chapter 3 © Ian E. Morley and Dian-Marie Hosking 2003 Chapter 4 © Peter Gronn 2003 Chapter 5 © Megan Crawford 2003 Chapter 6 © Alma Harris and Christopher Day 2003

Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter

7 8 9 10 11 12 13

First published 2003 Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means, only with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers. SAGE Publications Ltd 6 Bonhill Street London EC2A 4PU SAGE Publications Inc 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320 SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd B-42, Panchsheel Enclave Post Box 4109 New Delhi - 100 017 Library of Congress Control Number: 2003101545 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 7619 4924 0 ISBN 0 7619 4925 9 (pbk)

Typeset by C&M Digitals (P) Ltd., Chennai, India Printed by Athenaeum Press, Gateshead

© © © © © © ©

Lynne M. Hannay 2003 Jane McGregor 2003 Christine Wise 2003 John O’Neill 2003 Nigel Bennett 2003 Peter Ribbins 2003 Helen Gunter 2003

Contents

Acknowledgements

vii

Series Editor’s Preface

viii

Biographical Notes

ix

Introduction: Rethinking Educational Leadership – Challenging the Conventions Nigel Bennett and Lesley Anderson

1

Section 1: Laying Out the Perspectives

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1 Leadership in the (Post)Modern Era J. Tim Goddard

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2 Embracing Uncertainty: Organizing and Leading to Enhance the Knowledgeability and Capability of Teachers Rodney T. Ogawa

27

3 Leadership, Learning and Negotiation in a Social Psychology of Organizing Ian E. Morley and Dian-Marie Hosking

43

4 Distributing and Intensifying School Leadership Peter Gronn

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Section 2: The Perspectives in Practice

75

5 Challenging Circumstances: The Role of Distributed and Intensified Leadership Megan Crawford

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6 From Singular to Plural? Challenging the Orthodoxy of School Leadership Alma Harris and Christopher Day

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CONTENTS

7 Developing Alternative Conceptions of Leadership and Organizations through Restructuring Lynne M. Hannay

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8 Collaboration in Communities of Practice Jane McGregor

113

9 Leaders of Subject Communities Christine Wise

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10 Understanding Curriculum Leadership in the Secondary School John O’Neill

143

Section 3: The Perspectives and Professional Development

157

11 Assessing the Impact on Practice of Professional Development Activities Nigel Bennett

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12 Preparing for Leadership in Education: In Search of Wisdom Peter Ribbins

171

Section 4: Review And Overview

185

13 Comparing and Contrasting the Perspectives: Mapping the Field of Educational Leadership Helen Gunter

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Index

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Acknowledgements

We wish to express our sincere thanks to Tina McCay for her work on this manuscript and to Marianne Lagrange and Saleha Nessa of Sage Publications for their support and assistance throughout the preparation of the book. We also gratefully acknowledge the financial support provided by BELMAS for the preparation of the index.

Series Editor’s Preface

Nigel Bennett and Lesley Anderson were instrumental in organizing the highly successful BELMAS (British Educational Leadership Management and Administration Society) International Research Conference in 2000. The conference papers have been revized and restructured to provide two complementary edited books, the first on evidence-informed practice, and this book Rethinking Educational Leadership: Challenging the Conventions. The two editors have asked the authors to rewrite their conference papers to more fully address the themes of this book. Four of the chapters were specially commissioned for this book. Educational leadership has been given even higher political and educational priority by the establishment of a National College for School Leadership and plans for the provision of similar support for further education leaders and leadership. In this centralizing context it is particularly important that conventional thinking on leadership is challenged. The authors who have contributed to this book are all leading thinkers internationally. The introduction explores the current context and debate about leaders and leadership. The first section presents four alternatives to the current conventional theorizing about educational leadership. The second section explores the significance of these four models by asking six leading researchers to consider their empirical research evidence and its relationship to them. In section 3 the two chapters examine the implications of alternative views of leadership for professional preparation. The final chapter offers a critique of all the theoretical perspectives and attempts to structure their relationships through a mapping process. There is a right, and indeed a necessity, to challenge the approved in a political context where the rhetoric is of empowerment but the practice is greater authoritarianism. Given the central significance of leadership, and a tendency to devalue theory and research, Nigel Bennett and Lesley Anderson are to be congratulated on providing a collection which has such a clear, simple and effective structure, and on editing and focusing so successfully a book which should be read by all those who might otherwise accept the current orthodoxy. That means those who exercise educational leadership. Professor Harry Tomlinson

Biographical Notes

Lesley Anderson is a Lecturer in the Centre for Educational Policy and Management at the Open University. Nigel Bennett is a Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Educational Policy and Management at the Open University. Megan Crawford is a Senior Lecturer in School and Teacher Development at the University of Warwick. Christopher Day is Professor of Education and Co-director of the Centre for Research on Teacher and School Development at the School of Education, University of Nottingham. Peter Gronn is currently Associate Dean (Development) in the Faculty of Education, Monash University, Melbourne. J. Tim Goddard is an associate professor in the Graduate Division of Educational Research, Faculty of Education, University of Calgary. Helen Gunter is Reader in Educational Leadership and Management in the School of Education at the University of Birmingham. Lynne M. Hannay is Professor in the Department of Theory and Policy Studies in Education and Head of the Midwestern Field Centre at the Ontario Institute for Studies of Education of the University of Toronto. Alma Harris is Professor of School Leadership and Director of the Leadership, Policy and Improvement Unit at the Institute of Education, University of Warwick. Dian-Marie Hosking is Professor of Development and Change in the Department of Organizational Studies, the University of Tilburg, Netherlands. Jane McGregor was a secondary school teacher for many years before being awarded the TES Research Fellowship in Educational Policy at Lucy Cavendish College Cambridge. She is now completing a PhD at the Open University.

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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

Ian E. Morley is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Warwick. John O’Neill is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Social and Policy Studies in Education at Massey University, New Zealand. Rodney T. Ogawa is Professor of Education at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Peter Ribbins is Emeritus Professor in Educational Management at the University of Birmingham and visiting Professor at the University of Leicester. Christine Wise is a Lecturer in the Centre for Educational Policy and Management at the Open University.

Introduction: Rethinking Educational Leadership – Challenging the Conventions NIGEL BENNETT AND LESLEY ANDERSON

‘Leadership’ has become a key concept in the organization, management and administration of educational organizations and systems, and this development is reflected in both academic and educational policy statements throughout the English-speaking world. In England, for example, all school inspections must report on the quality of leadership found, heads of subject departments are referred to as ‘middle leaders’, and the government has created the National College for School Leadership for the training of headteachers and others in activities not directly related to curriculum and teaching. At the time of writing (late 2002) proposals are being considered for a leadership college for the post-compulsory sector. Many similar developments exist elsewhere. Much traditional writing on this topic focuses on the leader as a person. Sometimes this person acts in a formal role, exercising leadership on the basis of that role and position, and sometimes exercising it through some kind of informal acknowledgement of his or her authority. In this analysis, leaders ‘do’ leadership ‘to’ their followers. Although there is some reciprocity in the relationship, the leader is the dominant member and the relationship is frequently portrayed as a one-way process: one person leads, and the others follow. This view is particularly dominant in current English writing on leadership in education, and reflects a long tradition of headteacher leadership that stretches back through nineteenth-century private education to Dr Arnold at Rugby School, immortalized in Tom Brown’s Schooldays. It is the underlying assumption of charismatic leadership theory (Conger, 1989). It is also the foundation of transformational leadership, which Earley et al. (2002, pp. 80–1) call one of the two pre-eminent prescriptive models of school leadership in England (the other is instructional leadership, which they describe as focusing on ways in which classroom practice can embody more fully the aims articulated in the school’s mission statement). As they construct

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it, transformational leadership emphasizes a number of strongly person-centred dimensions, including building vision, establishing commitment to shared goals, providing intellectual stimulation, offering individualized support, and explicating high expectations of staff (ibid., p. 80). The transformational leader is therefore concerned with transforming staff expectations, creating individual learning by emphasizing intellectual stimulation and individual support, and generating organizational learning by drawing on that individual stimulation to formulate and gain consent to the goals through which the vision is to be realized. The transformational leader, then, is charismatic and works, not by force, but through the articulation of a vision that others are prevailed upon to subscribe to. This concept fits comfortably into Schein’s (1993) analysis of the relationship between organizations, their cultures, and their leaders. Schein writes of the importance of the ‘founder’ who sets up the organization and creates its culture (Ch. 11). Whilst a headteacher might not be the founder of a school, in England they have the capacity, over time, to re-create its membership. Campbell, Gold and Lunt (forthcoming) point out that the ability to recruit staff is a key dimension of successful transformational leadership, and quote one school principal as stating, ‘I’ve been lucky now. I’ve selected about eight per cent of the staff. At selection, I make it clear what is the vision and the ethos. They must want to work at [this school]’ (ibid., p. 8). From this point of view, leadership is concentrated in the hands of one or, perhaps, a small number of individuals. Leaders set direction and create the culture – the norms that constrain and prescribe action – that others conform to and follow. They stand on the boundary between the organization and its environment, scanning the horizon for future developments, filtering them and reinterpreting them so that their organization’s members know how to respond to them (Goldring, 1997). They are the source of change and transformation, and the follower is essentially a passive participant in the process. Even when an individual member of the organization generates ideas for change, their implementation is dependent on the approval of the leader. Depending on the degree of direct control that the leader seeks to exercise, she or he may be seen as the apex of a hierarchy or as the centre of a web. More recently, there has been an upsurge in the idea of leaders being found in other parts of the organization. Writing about schools, Sammons, Thomas and Mortimore (1997) and Harris, Busher and Wise (2001) have emphasized the leadership potential of heads of subject departments, who in England have been renamed ‘subject leaders’ (TTA, 1998). Those in formal positions as heads of department are now receiving attention as ‘middle leaders’ and England’s National College for School Leadership began in 2002 a national programme of training for such people, entitled ‘Leading from the Middle’. However, we should emphasize that middle leaders exercise that leadership within the clear constraints of policy and culture created by those senior to them, and still carry out the tasks required as individuals with formal responsibilities in a system.

INTRODUCTION

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Conventional leadership theory is to be found in the emphasis on collaboration and collegiality (Earley et al., 2002). However, as Hargreaves (1992) points out, we can distinguish between ‘true’ and ‘contrived’ collegiality. The former is an organic development that develops spontaneously between those colleagues who wish to work and take decisions on a collective basis; the latter is a created form of action that has the appearance of collegial decision-making but within carefully defined limits. Hargreaves suggests that contrived collegiality is often about creating an illusion of support for pre-determined decisions: at best an advisory service, and often a control device. However, within this conventional view of leaders acting within systems and, in particular, in the developing concept of ‘middle leaders’, there is a recognition of an important extension of leadership as an individually located function. Leaders, even charismatic leaders, cannot lead alone. Leaders may exercise their role as leaders in other parts of the organization. From this recognition it is but a short step to depersonalize leadership from individuals and relocate it as a function of, and within, organizations. This move opens up some questions that it could be argued receive insufficient attention within the conventional theories just summarized. Could leadership be about more than delivering the vision as articulated from ‘on high’? Might organizations be less monolithic than charismatic or hierarchically located person-centred leadership models assume – structurally loose (Weick, 1976) or culturally diffuse (Martin, 1992)? Could leadership be exercised in contradiction of the articulated ‘organizational vision’, perhaps in order to resist change or to restate a form of organizational culture that is under challenge? If leadership is not simply about delivering the articulated vision through the exercise of formally designated authority, what is the basis upon which it is exercised? This view suggests that leadership might be exercised by many different people at different times, and in relation to different issues, depending on the circumstances and the demands of each occasion. It is the basis of the concept of ‘distributed leadership’ which has become the focus of extensive discussion in the last 18 months (see especially Gronn, 2000; Chapter 4 this volume). A further question that arises from a view of leadership as a function is what is involved in its exercise. Leadership in pursuit of change and leadership in opposition to change both rest on a range of perceptions and understandings. Change and resistance involve engaging with both explicit knowledge – publicly articulated knowledge, such as a teacher’s subject knowledge – and tacit knowledge – what underpins our actions and our practice, but which it is difficult, and often impossible, to articulate (Lam, 2000). This combination drives both individual and collective practice. Achieving change involves both forms of knowledge, not just explicit knowledge, for without engaging with tacit knowledge, the innovator-leader will only influence colleagues’ espoused theories and will not affect their theories in use (Argyris, 1992). From this point of view, change involves learning, both by individuals and by the collectivity within which they work. Learning has to be seen as a reciprocal activity: to see the relationship as largely one way, as we suggest the current

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emphasis on charismatic visionary leadership does, is to see the task of instruction or teaching as coterminous with learning rather than as a catalyst of it. Analyses which incorporate this more sophisticated and dynamic view of the relationships which exist between ‘leaders’ and ‘followers’ can go beyond the orthodox distinction between transactional and transformational leadership and explore the implications for leadership studies of non-unitary conceptualizations of organizations. They can create alternative locations and understandings of leadership functions. Such alternative ways of looking at leadership provide a basis for analysing critically what we have called the conventional or orthodox view of it, and it is important that such critical analysis should be made available to policymakers, those in senior positions in educational systems, and those involved in their training and development. There is already evidence of this taking place, some of it being written by contributors to this volume. However, as any field of study and research develops, many separate but related ideas are advocated, with their authors often paying little attention to other writing as they jostle with one another for intellectual and political domination. Furthermore, at least in the early phases of this development, relatively little attempt is made to compare them dispassionately or to test them, either through significant new research or by revisiting and reanalysing existing research. This book is an attempt to begin that process. In this volume, we explore the utility and explanatory power of three particular perspectives on leadership, drawing on institutional theory, activity theory as developed in theories of distributed leadership, and the implications of the concept of communities of practice. We also examine further the value of a view of leadership that rests on contingency theory. These alternative views raise questions about ● ● ●

the nature of leadership as a function within organizations and communities; how it is constructed by individuals and the communities in which they operate; and what is seen as legitimate action by those charged with such responsibilities.

These appear to be largely taken for granted in the more ‘conventional’ literature. In order to explore these questions and the utility of these alternative perspectives in addressing them, this book examines their theoretical bases, re-examines a number of empirical studies to test the utility of these alternative perspectives, and explores their implications for the professional development of educators. Its origins lie in a number of presentations to the sixth international research conference of the British Educational Management and Administration Society (BEMAS),1 held in Cambridge in March 2000. Eight chapters in the book are reanalyses of research data presented at that conference, which have been carried out in order to assess the utility of one or more of the

INTRODUCTION

5

alternative perspectives on leadership presented in Section 1. Two other chapters are reworkings of papers to other BEMAS conferences. The other chapters have been prepared especially for this book. The book is divided into four sections. Four chapters in Section 1 outline perspectives on leadership that stand as alternatives to what has been suggested here is the current conventional theorization of leadership in education. In Chapter 1, Tim Goddard extends contingency theory into a wide range of leadership styles and approaches. Using the analogy of an Inuit dog-team, he suggests that the art of successful school leadership lies in relating together the demands of the environment, the students, the community and the staff, so creating an understanding of each situation. The successful leader then draws on knowledge of a wide repertoire of possible strategies in order to respond successfully and keep the school and its environment in balance. Goddard emphasizes the uncertainty of the school’s situation in terms of its destination and the problems that might be met along the way, the knowledge both tacit and explicit the individual has to draw on in order to analyse and respond to each situation as it arises, and the capability to utilize that knowledge in order to make the response that is necessary. In Chapter 2, Rodney Ogawa develops the concepts of uncertainty, knowledgeability and capability through the lens of institutional theory. He argues that both the purpose and technology of education are deeply contested, and that organizations exist as a means of attempting to create a sense of order out of the disorder that such contestation breeds. However, effective leadership must create a balance between order and disorder, enabling teachers to deploy the knowledgeability and capability that they need in order to do their work whilst encouraging learning and the development of both that can only arise when they are sufficiently uncertain about their work to question their practice. Chapter 3 further extends these analyses. Ian Morley and Dian-Marie Hosking propose that the relationship between people and their context is one of mutual creation, and that both contexts and persons are created, maintained and changed through conversation, most of which can be described as negotiation. This social constructivist position argues for the dynamic interaction of people and their contexts, and the importance of forms of negotiation to create, sustain and change this dynamic relationship. In this, they link their analysis to concepts of organizational culture and, more specifically, communities of practice. Once again, leadership is concerned with enabling this communication and negotiation to take place, and ensuring that it is sufficiently located in the existing context to be creative and constructive. They outline key dimensions of leadership activity that may help to achieve this. The last chapter of this section is by Peter Gronn, who examines the concept of distributed leadership within schools. Starting by questioning the leader–follower duality, he argues for de-centring analysis from ‘the’ leader and exploring two possible alternatives – ‘stretching’ leadership across two or more individuals so that potentially the entire workforce can exercise it, or

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‘conjoint agency’, which involves plural member work units. He explores three kinds of conjoint agency that might be identified, and then examines their utility – perhaps even necessity – as a response to the work-intensification being experienced by those with formal accountability responsibilities, such as principals and headteachers. He concludes by arguing against models of ‘designer leadership’ as intruding into the demands faced by those with formal leadership roles. In Section 2, six authors review their research into school leadership in the light of one or more of these perspectives. In Chapter 5, Megan Crawford begins the test of Gronn’s arguments for distributed leadership by re-examining her study of leadership in a primary school which ‘failed’ its national Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED) inspection. Her original study of the leadership provided by the headteachers who brought the school out of ‘special measures’ was originally based on charismatic theory, but she concludes that a distributed leadership analysis was able to identify additional influences and challenge some of her original arguments. Alma Harris and Christopher Day draw on two of the perspectives outlined in Section 1. They acknowledge the merits of Goddard’s typology, but feel that it does not address sufficiently the more structural issues they encountered in their study of 12 successful headteachers. Strongly critical of the cult of the individual leader that we have identified as current orthodoxy, they argue for a view of leadership that supports the principles of distributed leadership and stresses the social and contextual dimensions emphasized by Morley and Hosking. A similar melding of perspectives is offered in the next chapter by Lynne Hannay, who brings together elements of three chapters in Section 1: those of Ogawa, Gronn and, to a lesser extent, Morley and Hosking. She examines ways in which one Canadian school responded to a district requirement that all its schools should restructure, and that the status quo was unacceptable. Hannay tracks the ways in which staff opinion and commitment changed from hostility to the innovation into total commitment to it, so much so that when the school district was amalgamated with another and the school was forced to return to its previous structure there was great anger among the staff. Three of our authors in Section 2 have focused on the concept of communities of practice. In Chapter 8 Jane McGregor explores its utility in relation to her study of teacher collaboration in three secondary schools. She draws on the analyses of leadership presented by Gronn and Morley and Hosking to argue that communities of practice provide a powerful analytical tool for examining forms of collaboration and their implications for shared values and the generation of new knowledge. Then, in Chapter 9, Christine Wise discusses the secondary school subject department as a community of practice, drawing strongly on Wenger’s (2000) analysis. She relates it to the issue of teacher monitoring, a responsibility of all heads of department, and considers how working to re-create the formal organizational unit of the subject department

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as a community of practice might help to overcome the resistance to monitoring by offering it as a form of collective learning. In contrast to these two chapters, John O’Neill launches a strong attack on the idea, directing his criticism in particular at Wenger (1998). He finds that his original analysis, which drew on a range of more established sociological analyses, was far more helpful in interpreting his data. Section 3 examines the implications of alternative views of leadership for professional development in the fields of leadership development. In Chapter 11, Nigel Bennett re-examines data from a pilot study exploring how schools and teachers might assess the impact of their professional development experiences on individual and collective practice. Drawing on the institutional theory perspective put forward by Ogawa in Chapter 2, he suggests that the concepts of uncertainty, knowledgeability and capability provide a useful theoretical framework within which to assess both individual and organizational needs from professional development and what is achieved as a result. Peter Ribbins then presents a critique of current models of headteacher preparation and offers an alternative view which emphasizes the significance of values and philosophy. He relates this to the perspectives put forward in Section 1, and suggests that they contribute to a powerful and practical alternative approach to the task that creates a stronger and less instrumental model of leadership. A volume that presents a range of theoretical perspectives and attempts to apply them needs a discussion that looks across the whole range of ideas and provides a dispassionate critique. In Section 4, the final chapter of the book, Helen Gunter reflects on the book as a whole. Drawing on her own recent work on mapping the field of leaderhip studies, she suggests that the chapters in this book have contributed to that process by successfully challenging conventions and legitimizing the challenge. She argues that the contributors have raised significant issues relating to both theory and day-to-day practice of leadership in education. She concludes that the chapters in this book succeed in demonstrating how ‘thinking’ and ‘doing’ are not separate but integrated, and that both are alive and well in the field. NOTE 1. Now BELMAS – the British Educational Leadership, Management and Administration Society.

REFERENCES Argyris, C. (1990) Overcoming Organizational Defenses: Facilitating Organizational Learning . Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon. Campbell, C., Gold, A. and Lunt, I. (forthcoming) ‘Articulating leadership values in action: conversations with school leaders’, forthcoming in International Journal of Leadership in Education. Conger, J.A. (1989). The Charismatic Leader: Behind the Mystique of Exceptional Leadership. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

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Earley, P., Evans, J., Collarbone, P., Gold, A. and Halpin, D. (2002) Establishing the Current State of School Leadership in England. London: DfES. Goldring, E. (1997) Educational leadership: schools, environments and boundary ∨ spanning, in M. Preedy, R. Glatter and R. Levacic´ (eds), Educational Management: Strategy, Quality and Resources (pp. 290–9). Buckingham: Open University Press. Gronn, P. (2000) Distributed properties: a new architecture for leadership, Educational Management and Administration, 28(3), 317–38. Hargreaves, A. (1992) Contrived collegiality: the micropolitics of teacher collaboration, in N. Bennett, M. Crawford and C. Riches (eds), Managing Change in Education: Individual and Organizational Perspectives (pp. 80–94). London: Paul Chapman Publishing. Harris, A., Busher, H. and Wise, C. (2001) Effective training for subject leaders, Journal of In-service Education, 27(1), 83–94. Lam, A. (2000) Tacit knowledge, organizational learning and societal institutions: an integrated framework, Organizational Studies, 21(3), 487–513. Martin, J. (1992) Cultures in Organizations: Three Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sammons, P., Thomas, S. and Mortimore, P. (1997) Forging Links: Effective Schools and Effective Departments. London: Paul Chapman Publishing. Schein, E.H. (1993) Organizational Culture and Leadership. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass, 2nd ed. Teacher Training Agency (TTA) (1998) National Standards for Subject Leaders. London: TTA. Weick, K. (1976) Educational organizations as loosely coupled systems, Administrative Science Quarterly, 21(1), 1–21. Wenger, E. (1998) Communities of Practice, Learning, Meaning and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wenger, E. (2000) Communities of practice and social learning systems, Organization, 7(2), 225–46.

SECTION 1

LAYING OUT THE PERSPECTIVES

1 Leadership in the (Post)Modern Era1 J. TIM GODDARD

OF DAFFODILS AND DOG TEAMS: LEADERSHIP IN THE (POST)MODERN ERA When my grandmother saw the first daffodils bursting through the ground, she knew exactly what to expect. Stately yellow blooms nodding on big green stems, the same in her Yorkshire garden as Wordsworth had observed on the Lake District hills. Now, as I watch the young shoots fight their way through the mud of a Canadian spring, I have to consult my planting guide (Breck’s, 2002). Is this a clump of the pure white blooms of the Mount Hood, or the clustered heads of the Avalanche, or the orange-red of the Fortissimo … As it is with daffodils, so it is with leadership. It seems there are as many definitions of leadership as there are those who write about the concept. In graduate courses and programmes around the world a new generation of aspiring administrators are taught about Theories X, Y and Z, about 9-9 managerial grids and System 4 organizations, about linking pins and loose coupling … often failing, it seems, to take into account the warnings of Hughes (1994, p. 7) and others that we ‘must be skeptical of simplistic models of leadership’. In this chapter I do not attempt to provide a single conceptualization of what leadership is, nor do I attempt to develop a scale by which leadership ability might be measured and analysed. To do so would be to suggest that leadership is a concept which can be pinned down like a butterfly on a board, or bottled like glacial water, and that a single person can, on their own, provide the consumers with such a product. INTRODUCTION In this chapter the focus is on leadership as it relates to the role of the schoolbased administrator, headteacher or principal. In locating leadership within this role I ignore those elements that pertain to other decision-making functions within education, such as the superintendency (Berg, 1995; Patterson, 1993). Further, the role of the principal is presented within the context of a ‘western’ education system, specifically one that draws upon the Anglo-Canadian 11

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experience. Thus those issues raised by Hallinger and Leithwood (1996) and Heck (1996) concerning leadership outside the western context are not part of this discussion. Similarly I do not attempt to explore the nuances of application that are related to issues of post-coloniality (Smith, 2001) or race and gender (McGee Banks, 2000). Finally, I take an individual, rather than institutional (Ogawa and Bossert, 1995), perspective and thus ignore those elements related to the sharing of leadership functions (Hajnal et al., 1997) or the development of teacher leaders (Hart, 1994). This is not to say that issues of race, gender, institution, geography, culture and class, among other ethnocultural variables (Goddard, 1997), ought to be ignored. Such factors form part of the weft and warp of the fabric of leadership. These issues not only constitute the context within which leadership is exercised but are also part of the concept itself. Similarly, the notion of shared leadership must be recognized and acknowledged. Indeed, the development of schools as learning organizations, or communities, is predicated on the understanding that leadership is spread throughout the organization (Beck, 1999; Leonard, 1999; Wallace, 2000). A sign on a door does not a leader make. However, for the purposes of the analysis presented here it is useful to restrict the description to within the confines of a single role. Although presented from a singular perspective, it should be understood that the leadership styles presented and discussed here have application outside the principal’s office. The role of leadership is not contained within a single individual by virtue of their positional authority; however, the function of leadership is exercised by individuals acting within a certain organizational position. From this dichotomy there emerges an important contradiction. Although Fiedler (1996, p. 241) regales us with stories of idiosyncratic leaders and cautions us to accept that ‘leadership does make a difference’, for many North American educators the notion of a ‘great man’ theory of leadership has been placed on the compost heap of history. Conversely, in England and Wales, the Fresh Start approach for ‘failing’ schools has championed the idea of a ‘super head’ who can single-handedly redress the situation. In this chapter the focus is not on the individual role incumbent but, rather, on the styles, or strategies, that might be part of the repertoire of an effective leader. In reviewing the literature it is apparent that many different types of leadership have been identified. The administrative equivalents of Dutch botanists are working overtime to develop new varieties for the jaded palates of those who would analyse the role and function of practitioners who somehow seem to make a difference in the operation of schools. In this chapter I briefly summarize 14 different strains of leadership which have been identified; the shelves are so crammed that this is not an exhaustive list, but rather one that is representative of the literature. I then suggest that to adopt any one of these forms is, in itself, not a means to achieve success as a principal. Rather, it is necessary for the administrator to select from a variety of leadership styles as the situation permits. The metaphor of an Inuit dog-team is used to illustrate how this may be achieved.

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LEADERSHIP To define leadership is a task which has caught the imagination of both practitioners and academics over the years. There are those who exhort practitioners not to confuse leadership with status, power, or official authority (Gardner, 2000). Others suggest that leadership can be examined as a function rather than as a role, for a role is essentially located in the person who occupies it, whereas a function can be conceived of and discharged in other ways (N. Bennett, personal communication, August 2001). I tend to view leadership in anthropological terms, drawing upon my experiences working with communities from the western Pacific to northern Canada. In such communities there are rarely formal roles or job descriptions, and yet leaders abound. In my experience, therefore, leading is surely the act of working with a group of individuals to achieve communal goals. As such there need be no official authority in place; people listen to those with the best ideas, not those with the biggest name tag. Any power or status achieved through leadership is fleeting and transient, good only for the current situation and then transferred to someone else who has better ideas about the next challenge. Leadership is functional in that it is only present when it is being exercised. To define leadership in any categorical way has proven both difficult and, perhaps, unnecessary. The problem arises that once the concept is defined to our own personal satisfaction, we then attempt to teach the concept as though it were learnable (e.g., Smith and Piele, 1997). Herein lies the difficulty. Leadership is not learnable in the sense that one might learn how to boil an egg; once the basic idea of boiling water and leaving the egg in that water for three to five minutes is mastered, one might boil eggs all over the world with a certain degree of impunity. Unless, of course, one finds oneself high in the Himalayas, where altitudinal differences in air pressure mean that significantly more time is required. I have never been to the Himalayas, but I do know how to boil eggs at lower altitudes and am confident that I would be able to amend my practice, if required, based on knowledge learned from those who have travelled to Tibet, Nepal and Bhutan. Leadership is not so simply learned. In schools, leadership is a concept both multidimensional and multifaceted, where the values, goals, beliefs and decisionmaking skills of the principal give purpose and meaning to the policies and procedures which she or he is duty-bound to implement. These policies and procedures, however, together with the norms of the school context within which they are implemented, are not set by the principal or the school but rather are established and affected by national, provincial, divisional and local pressure groups. To respond to this pressurized and unstructured environment requires a multiplicity of skills. Such skills can be conceptualized as ways, or styles, of leading a community of others in an attempt to help achieve the collective goals. In this chapter I argue that the contextuality of leadership is such that

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the principal must have knowledge of, and be able to appropriately adopt, a variety of different leadership styles. The adoption of such an approach, predicated as it is on the tenets of contingency theory, suggests that there is no ‘correct’ answer or response to any situation. While true, this does not mean that all responses are appropriate. Rather, it is incumbent upon the leader to select the response appropriate for that particular situation in that specific time and place, and which is also sensitive to the beliefs and values of all participants to the decision. This requires the leader to make a ‘flexible and appropriate adaptation to the immediate situation’ (Davis, Sumara and Luce-Kapler, 2000, p. 130). Such an adaptation is not future focused but rather grounded in ‘the present, as conditioned by past experience and biological predisposition’ (ibid., p. 130). Similarly Hales (1993), Kelley (2000), McGregor (Chapter 8 this volume) and others have stressed the importance of context in influencing the decisionmaking and learning processes that occur within an organization such as a school. Here follows a description of 14 styles, identified from the literature. The list is neither exhaustive nor prescriptive, merely illustrative. One might argue that situational leadership is the only ‘true’ leadership style and that the others are simply examples of this in action. However, I would suggest that significant differences of focus, value and action found between the different styles require each to be considered separate and independent from the others. The styles are presented as potential strategies for leaders to implement in different contexts. Situational leadership The work of Hersey and Blanchard (1977) has been expanded to embrace the tenets of contingency theory. Through boundary scanning and the judicious development of contingency plans, the effective leader utilizes the situation to gain power, control, and influence over the actions of subordinates (Fiedler, 1993). Such negotiation, compromising, coalition building and resource allocation are the hallmarks of the political actor (Bolman and Deal, 1991). Situational leadership requires administrators to fully immerse themselves in their school community and be intimately knowledgeable about the context within which they work. Managerial leadership The managerial leader focuses on the maintenance of a system. She or he puts great effort into planning and organizing the day-to-day operations of the school. Budgets are carefully constructed and rigorously monitored, resources are located and allocated, subordinates are co-ordinated and controlled, strategic and tactical plans are designed, prioritized and implemented. The focus, as Bolman and Deal (1991) have observed, is on the rationality, efficiency, structure and policies of the structural frame. Drawing on the writings

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of business and public administration (e.g., Hales, 1993; Simon, 1960), such a techno-rational or ‘scientific’ approach has been embraced by educational administrators since the middle of the twentieth century. Although this approach often results in a hierarchical and bureaucratic structure that is anathema in these postmodern times, there is still the need for such diligence. Teachers do not want to spend their lives making decisions about which company provides the best deal for buying photocopier paper or what colour the paper clips should be for the office. There is a need for managerial leadership in moderation, and moderation in management. To determine the overall budget parameters may be within the purview of the administrative team of the school; to involve teachers in the process of deciding how that budget is expended is good management practice. Instructional leadership This style of leadership was very popular in the early 1980s. The focus of the principal was seen to be on the promotion of an effective instructional climate, on providing teachers with advice and support as they delivered the curriculum. On such understandings were predicated the efforts of the effective schools movement (e.g., Edmunds, 1979; Lezotte, 1989) as attempts were made to develop a menu of strategies from which a principal could draw. It rapidly became apparent that headteachers were not able to be curriculum experts in all fields. Some teachers became disgruntled when principals were perceived to be overstepping their professional boundaries. ‘What the heck does he know about teaching the sciences? It’s facts, it’s real learning, not touchy-feely like the humanities stuff’ exclaimed one teacher. This was after a principal with a background in English language arts had critiqued a high school physics lesson as being ‘rather boring’ and ‘quite teacher focused, not utilizing the more modern collaborative learning techniques’ (John MacDonald, personal communication, 16 March 1999). Although instructional leadership has become less common as a declared priority, responsibilities for many instructional decisions have been divisionalized (Hales, 1993) to the department level. Servant leadership Greenleaf (1977) argued that the legitimate power of the leader only develops if the leader sees him or herself as a servant of those being led. Leaders have to achieve balance between their operating and conceptual talents; the former carries the organization forward in its daily tasks and objectives, and the latter permits leaders to see the whole within the perspective of time, both past and present. The leader is not so much a charismatic visionary preacher as a cloistered monk or nun, one who views the role as a vocation where the desire to serve outweighs any need for peer recognition or professional advancement.

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This approach has touched a chord with those (e.g., Thom, 2001) who see authenticity in simplicity. To have the leader as servant of the people calls to mind some of the great religious teachers of the past, for example Mohammed, Buddha or Christ. If the leader has no personal gain from her actions, it is argued, then the cause must be just and right for no ego or benefit is satisfied. This notion of stewardship resurfaces in contemporary discussions of community. White knight and black hat leadership Sometimes, a leader is ‘parachuted’ in to a school in order to ‘fix’ real or perceived problems. Often dubbed a ‘white knight’, she or he brings rescue to those isolated in the dragon’s cave. No matter how tense the situation or how hopeless the odds, such a ‘super head’ will be able to save the day. If wholesale staff transfers or redundancies are required, however, the metaphor changes from chivalry to the Wild West, and the new leader is said to ‘wear a black hat’ as she or he cleans up the lawless town. Incompetent teachers tremble as she or he comes stamping down the corridors, clipboard in hand, ready to assess and judge. Such perspectives assume that schools are tightly coupled organizations within which the actions of one person, who embodies all the leadership qualities in that school, might have a significant and lasting impact. As Murphy, Hallinger and Mitman (1983) observe, this perspective also assumes that the principal can control her or his own work flow. For those caught in the maelstrom of public school life such an idea is ludicrous. I have often challenged administrators to sit down for a few moments before leaving for work and write a list of the ‘ten things I would like to achieve today’, then, at the end of the day, to check that list against what actually happened. There is seldom any correlation. From the moment of arrival in the school they are enmeshed in tasks, situations and circumstances over which they have very little control. They achieve many things over the course of a day’s work, but these are seldom the things that were written on the list over an early morning coffee. Indirect leadership We recognize that not all leadership is embodied within an individual. Strategies to facilitate the empowerment of all staff to provide leadership focus on the human and symbolic frames of the organization (Bolman and Deal, 1991). It is recognized that the 20-year veteran teacher may be a more powerful leader than the person with their nameplate on the office door. The indirect leader often leads by example. Rather than making a big fuss over teachers not being present to welcome children to the school in the morning, for example, she or he may take to being proudly visible in the entry way and the corridors. To encourage support for social or sporting events, the indirect leader is present at many of the events and makes friendly contact with any colleagues encountered. Teachers are usually quick to pick up on such messages.

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Collaborative leadership Lugg and Boyd (1993) suggest that the principal establish external and internal linkages for the school. Externally, these linkages require better communication, co-operation, collaboration and co-ordination with social and community agencies. Internally, trust and collegiality must be established between teachers, students and administrators. The principal must facilitate this collaborative process if leadership is to be effective. The establishment of external linkages is intended to establish much closer relationships between the school and other societal institutions and organizations. It goes beyond the identification of a local business that might sponsor certain events in order to be proclaimed a ‘partner’ in the education process. Ethical leadership There is a growing recognition that the work of leaders is predicated on the value and belief systems they hold. Notions of caring, justice and ethics are the foundations on which observed behaviour is constructed. The works of Greenfield (1993) and Hodgkinson (1996), for example, address these issues. The actions of the leader cannot be separated from the value positions held, for understandings of ‘right’, ‘wrong’, or even ‘(not) appropriate’, depend upon recognition of individual world views and beliefs. Dialogical leadership Freire (1970) suggested that those with whom the leader was interacting often had a more complete understanding of their situation than did the leader. Thus, it was incumbent upon the leader to establish a dialogue with those whom she or he wished to lead. Only through discussion could truth be determined and appropriate action developed and implemented – action appropriate not only to the leader but to the followers as well. There is a need for leaders to immerse themselves in their community of learners, to understand how certain actions are perceived and understood. For those in marginalized communities, school leaders are predominantly outsiders (Goddard and Foster, 2001). These principals must recognize that there will be attempts to mislead and misguide, and that not all actions will ever be fully understood by those who do not share the cultural heritage from which the actions emerged. Transcultural leadership The recognition that contemporary workforces are not culturally homogeneous has led to the development of the notion of transcultural leadership (Simons, Vazquez and Harris, 1993). There is a need for leaders to be sensitive to, recognize and accept different cultural values and beliefs. The leader must recognize both the emic (perspective of self) and etic (perspective of the observer) in every situation. Thus, when someone of an ethnocultural

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background different from that of the principal behaves in a certain way, the effective leader is able to not only determine her or his own perspective but to recognize the underlying values and meanings of that behaviour from the perspective of the person making the action. The notion of transcultural leadership embraces issues of communication. It has been suggested that 55 per cent of communication is through non-verbal cues (Barbour, 1998). This can lead to confusing and contradictory situations. The Anglo-European, used to a more verbal culture, tends to accept the spoken and ignore the more subtle hints proclaimed by body language. The effective administrator must be aware of, and react appropriately to, non-verbal interactions with the staff, students and parents in her or his school. Influencing leadership The purpose of this leadership style is to achieve organizational goals by enhancing the productivity and satisfaction of the workforce. Such a person must be sensitive to the issues of the day, know the source of those issues and be able to recognize what values are involved (Miklos, 1983). In maintaining a balance between contradictory forces, the leader can use these tensions to bring about change in practice. Influencing leadership differs from indirect leadership in the intentionality that is involved. An indirect leader often leads by example, but her or his actions are grounded in a personal belief system that makes such action taken for granted in its nature. The influencing leader, however, is purposive in using that influence. The distributed nature of influence is such that this strategy, perhaps more than the others, is often demonstrated by those who have no formal leadership role. ‘Marxiavellian’ leadership The principal cannot act alone in achieving the goals and objectives she or he has set for the school. The micro-political interactions that exist among any staff provide opportunities for an alert administrator. Recognizing that there are class distinctions within the staff, student and parental bodies, the principal uses persuasion and exchange to manipulate the allocation of resources (Goddard, 1993). The subclasses of gender, ethnicity, age, socio-economic status, and so forth, are played off against each other so the goals of the organization can be better achieved. Resources are allocated to the area where they might best serve the long-term needs of the organization. It is sometimes necessary for the head to make strategic alliances with groups of teachers within the school. These groups have their own agendas in play, and it is up to the head as to whether she or he ought to accept the realpolitik of the situation or not. The timely distribution of scarce resources might assist here. For example, the percentage of a budget used for new mathematics textbooks might influence the vote received from the mathematics department on an issue related to student discipline. Such lessons may then be

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reinforced if a negative vote is followed by the withdrawal of previously enjoyed resources. Transformational leadership The principal is not content with being the only leader in the school. Rather, she or he facilitates the development of leadership abilities within all staff. She or he does this by identifying and articulating a vision for the school, conveying expectations for high levels of performance, and providing both intellectual stimulation and individualized support (Burns, 1978; Leithwood, 1994). The staff are transformed from followers to leaders within the organization. Such a transformation requires a heavy investment in the professional development of teachers, enabling and mobilizing them to act as change agents in their own professional development. However, as Hales (1993, p. 217) observed, ‘the mobilisation of employees is only a powerful management force if the mobilisation is in a positive direction’. Such a direction might be found in the ‘reculturing’ (Hargreaves, 1997) of schools. It must be recognized, of course, that a collaborative and professional school culture will not arise from the ashes of current practice without a major influx of resources. Of these, perhaps the most critical is time. It is through the allocation of time that a principal can facilitate the spaces necessary for teachers to talk to teach other, to observe each others’ lessons, to provide support and encouragement as required. In a truly transformational school, not just the ‘regular’ teachers are involved in the initiatives. All too often supply or substitute teachers are the ‘untouchable’ class, brought in on the whims of daily need. A school that wishes to become truly transformational ought to develop a small but appropriate pool of possible replacement teachers. Then, using the sports analogy of ‘bench strength’, the principal has a core group of regular and reserve teachers from whom to draw when allocating tasks, constructing committees, and so forth. Constructivist leadership Lambert et al. (1995) suggest that leadership is not learned but, rather, is made by the leader and the followers, working together. They argue that traditional models are male-thinking and need to be carefully analysed, as women’s ways of knowing may lead to different leadership methods. In constructing what leadership is, and, perhaps as importantly, agreeing on what it is not, all members of the staff participate in both its development and practice. It is though the construction, deconstruction and reconstruction of meaning that a school might develop its own understandings of effective leadership. In this way it becomes possible for a school to determine a less hierarchical and more collaborative approach to ‘the way things are done around here’. In this manner the lines of demarcation between ‘leadership’ and ‘followership’ are blurred and, in some cases, erased. The skills, abilities and knowledge of all

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individuals are accepted in the decision-making process. The role of the formal leader is to ensure that all constituents are involved, to the extent that they wish, in the construction and enactment of leadership within the school. LESSONS FROM THE INUIT The preceding description of 14 leadership styles might be considered part of the ‘science’ of administration. These are skills that can be learned and practised. It is in the implementation, however, that the ‘art’ of leadership becomes apparent. To understand the science of school administration is one thing. To understand which style is appropriate under which circumstances, and to make an instantaneous decision in this regard, is quite another. It is in discussing the art of leadership that I turn to the metaphor of an Inuit dog-team. In the high Arctic the winds scour the land. There is little precipitation. The low plains are covered with a thin veneer of snow, which then blows around for months, alternatively obscuring and revealing the natural features of the landscape. The ice cracks and heaves, sometimes forming high ridges and at other times parting to reveal the cold slate sea. Across this land travels the Inuk, his primary means of transportation the komatiq, a sled drawn by a dozen or more dogs. These dogs are not harnessed in a neat row, for there is no need here to navigate through the closely growing trees of the Boreal forest. Rather, the dogs are tied to individual lines connected to the front of the komatiq. The Inuk will change the position of the dogs as he sees fit, for some are better in the areas where there are stretches of open water, as they are somehow able to tell when thin ice will bear the weight of the sled and its supplies. Others are better suited to finding the easiest ways across a series of ice ridges which rise to block the horizon. Yet others can sense the location of a predatory polar bear, and guide the Inuk away from the danger before he even knows it exists. The land is open but it is not empty. There are many obstacles between the Inuk and his destination. It is in his ability to read the landscape, to select the correct lead dog for the circumstances, that he pins his survival. The school principal exists in a similarly forbidding terrain. Her or his landscape is full of dangers, both hidden and observed, and there are many obstacles between the place where the school exists now and the destination described in the carefully constructed vision statement. The principal pins her or his survival on the ability to read this landscape, to select the correct leadership style for the circumstances, and to guide the komatiq which is the school across the wasteland to the safety of the camp. The sled is loaded with a variety of bundles. Here, in the centre, are the students. At the front, mainly, with a smaller bundle at the back, are the teachers. Pushed to the back are the parents, and along the sides the community, the school board, provincial department of education employees, university professors and other miscellaneous groups. Crammed into all the available nooks and crannies are the resources for the school, possibly not enough for

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the journey but all that were available when the time to travel arrived. The principal checks the load, makes sure that everything is tied down and scans the horizon through squinting eyes. The destination is known, for she or he has been there before or has read about it in the books that make up the maps of educational reform and renewal. Yet it is also not known, for her or his travel to there has never been from this place. The destination is over the horizon, and the first part of the journey is across unfamiliar ground. A tentative path is determined, the principal mentally mapping the territory she or he can see in front. She or he selects the leadership style that she or he thinks is most appropriate for this terrain, and harnesses it in the lead position. The other styles are tied on individually, extending in a fan shape from the central hitch. Each will share in the pulling of the sled for as different circumstances arise which require different tactics, so the principal will change the lead style around. The recognition, indeed prediction, of which contingency variables are likely to be encountered enables the principal to establish a proactive administration. Through this imaginization (Morgan, 1997) of the future, the principal moves beyond the maintenance of the school system and enters into the practice of systems change. As the circumstances change, so does the leadership style employed. In one instance, the principal may face a request from a community group to use the school car park for a Saturday morning pancake breakfast; here she or he employs her or his managerial style and provides a prompt response. Later, she or he is attempting to introduce a new discipline code to the school. Here she or he engages the staff, students and parents in a constructivist discussion to determine the parameters and consequences of (un)acceptable practice. It is in the ability to predict which style will be appropriate before there is an emergency that the effective principal will make a difficult journey appear quite untoward. This is a search for sprezzatura, an Italian Renaissance term implying the ‘ability to do something of great difficulty or complexity as if it had cost no effort at all’ (Chambers, 1996, p. 96). Such is the image projected by many an admired principal. With the dogs hitched, the sled loaded and the direction set, the Inuk does not consider his task complete. He does not now climb aboard the komatiq and rest. Rather, he runs alongside the sled, urging the dogs to run faster, to slow down for that patch of soft snow, to veer left in order to avoid the widest leads, to stop and huddle in the lee of a ridge so as to avoid an oncoming storm. Sometimes he uses his whip, pushing the labouring dogs to even greater efforts. Sometimes he hauls upon the ice brake, slowing the team from its breakneck pace. Sometimes he jumps onto the edge of the sled and tightens a rope, or rearranges the load for better balance, or shifts an unwieldy bundle to another part of the sled. Sometimes, perhaps, across a rare smooth field of ice, he sits on the back of the komatiq and waggles his feet and enjoys the view. Such reflective moments are equally rare for the principal. For most of the time she or he is scanning the landscape. Is that a storm coming up over the

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horizon? Is that a problematic pack of wolves following behind in the tracks? Is that a soft spot ahead where special care must be taken? Is the load properly balanced, with the various bundles in a proper relationship to each other? Is the optimum load being carried for the resources available? These are the questions asked by the principal on a daily basis. Although the questions seldom differ, the answers are rarely the same. EMERGENT THEMES In utilizing the metaphor of an Inuit dog-team to explore notions of school leadership, three themes emerge. First, it is apparent that the relationships between the Inuk, the komatiq and the dogs are intricate and reciprocal. The Inuk must be able to both lead and follow the dogs; the dogs must be able to both guide and be guided; and, the sled must hold a balanced and moderate load. Second, and further to the first, the interdependency of Inuk and dogs is such that ‘leadership’ is difficult to define. Whereas the Inuk selects a certain lead dog for certain conditions (thus practising leadership), he might then help to manoeuvre the sled in the direction the dogs want to go (thus practising followership). As such, the relationship is not dichotomous but rather an example of ‘two principles which oppose one another in their actions … [and simultaneously] produce one another and overcome one another’ (Hooker, n.d., p. 2). At any one time, then, the Inuk is both leading and following, although one act has temporary dominance over the other. The third theme relates to the size and arrangement of the load, which must be such that the sled can be pulled by the dogs. In addition to the cargo being transported, the sled must also carry the resources required for a successful journey. Further, these goods must be arranged in such a way that the sled is balanced and will not be upset should a rough environment be experienced. These three themes can be reviewed through an educational lens. The leadership–followership relationship has consumed many writers, who strive to understand whether and when teachers might be leaders and principals might be followers. Such discussions often sink into a slough of arguments related to specific aspects, the minutiae of politics, power and so forth. I would suggest that we accept the fluid location of leadership, consider that both it and followership may emerge at different times, to different people, and recognize that there is no one ‘correct’ interpretation of this relationship. Indeed, the leader in one endeavour might quite logically be the follower in another. Such thinking requires us to break the shackles of hierarchy and position, and to focus on the function rather than the role of leadership. I would suggest that leadership and followership can be contemplated as opposite principles, the Yin and Yang of educational administration. The cyclical nature of these opposing phenomena means that each will turn into its opposite in a cycle of reversal, that each has within it the seed of its opposite state, and that even if the opposite is not currently visible it is always

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there, for ‘no phenomenon is completely devoid of its opposite state … This is called “presence in absence”’ (Hooker, n.d., p. 2). The use of the dog-team metaphor allows us to better grasp the complexity and interdependency of the leadership–followership relationship. CONCLUSION This, then, is leadership for the new millenium. It is neither static nor discrete, neither bounded nor prescribed. This is contingency theory leavened by the realities of the postmodern era. There is a growing need for school leaders to recognize that the building is no longer separate from the community. Indeed, I am not sure that it ever was. In the early years of compulsory primary education, one-room schools were very much part of the fabric of the community they served. The post-war baby boom, coupled with the collapse of the agricultural industry and migration to the urban centres, led to a huge increase in children attending school. This, in turn, resulted in a movement towards a factory model of education, where more and more children were crammed into limited space. As the buildings became more crowded and less personal, so the bureaucratic management style became ascendant. It was impossible for principals to individually know all their students, and so in order to maintain the illusion of fairness they pretended to know none. In these postmodern times we are rediscovering the importance of community. We seek to re-create safe and appropriate spaces wherein effective teaching and learning can take place. We strive to provide a caring environment where individuality is preserved, but not at the cost of cohesiveness and community. Here children can learn not only the academic knowledge required for success in the world beyond school, but can also find spiritual and physical maturity. The membrane between school and community has become translucent to the point of invisibility. As school children perform community service for their citizenship credit, so elections are held in gymnasiums and parents meet every Thursday evening in the art room for their pottery classes. As the school sends notes home to parents, so the parents and the home become part of the school. As the children arrive at classes and the parents volunteer their time in the teachers’ room, so the school becomes part of the home. In the world outside this community, departments and ministries of education issue new edicts related to curriculum and assessment. Daily newspapers describe the latest whereabouts of paedophiles. Companies dominant in the town lay off thousands of employees. Parents claim that the school is unsuitable for their children because it is not preparing them for jobs in the real world. It is in this landscape that the principal functions. As the Inuk scans the horizon for storms, ice ridges, polar bears and weak ice, so the principal scans her or his landscape. She or he must rely on the contents of the educational komatiq, on the students, teachers and resources with whom she or he must

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work. There is no opportunity, out here on the sea ice, to suddenly replace items with new ones. Informed by a knowledge of the landscape through which the community must pass, assisted by an ability to read the changing environment, the leader guides the school across difficult terrain towards an established goal. She or he selects different leadership styles as appropriate, but does not discard the ones that are not best suited for the task in hand. Rather, she or he uses their strengths as needed, and keeps the different styles close so that she or he might always be aware of their strengths and weaknesses. The leader cajoles and inspires, threatens and rewards, and sometimes gets the opportunity to rest along the way. At such times the journey becomes worthy of the effort, and there comes a moment to relax and waggle one’s feet. NOTE 1. An earlier version of this chapter was presented, as a paper, to the Annual Meeting of the British Educational Management and Administration Society, Warwick, England, on 19 September 1998.

REFERENCES Barbour, A. (1998) Louder than Words: Non-verbal Communication. Available: http://www.minoritycareernet.com Beck, L.G. (1999) Metaphors of educational community: an analysis of the images that reflect and influence scholarship and practice, Educational Administration Quarterly, 35(1), 13–45. Berg, J.H. (1995) Context and perception: implications for leadership, paper presented to the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Francisco, California, April. Bolman, L.G. and Deal, T.E. (1991) Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Breck’s (2002) Bulbs from Holland Catalogue. Port Burwell, ON: Author. Burns, J.M. (1978) Leadership. New York: HarperCollins. Chambers, D. (1996) Stonyground. Toronto, ON: A.A. Knopf. Davis, B., Sumara, D. and Luce-Kapler, R. (2000) Engaging Minds: Learning and Teaching in a Complex World. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Edmunds, R.R. (1979) Some schools work and more can, Social Policy, 9, 28–32. Fiedler, F.E. (1993) The contingency model: New directions for leadership utilization, in M.T. Matteson and J.M. Ivancevich (eds), Management and Organizational Behavior Classics, 5th edn (pp. 333–44). Homewood, IL: Irwin. (First published 1974.) Fiedler, F.E. (1996) Research on leadership selection and training: one view of the future, Administrative Science Quarterly, 41, 241–50. Freire, P. (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum. Gardner, J.W. (2000) The nature of leadership, in The Jossey-Bass Reader on Educational Leadership (pp. 3–12). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. (First published 1990.) Goddard, J.T. (1993) Marxiavellian leadership, unpublished research paper, Department of Educational Administration, University of Alberta.

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Goddard, J.T. (1997) Monocultural teachers and ethnoculturally diverse students, Journal of Educational Administration and Foundations, 12(1), 30–45. Goddard, J.T. and Foster, R.Y. (2001) Educational leadership in northern Canada: the challenge of diversity, paper presented to Division G of the American Educational Research Association, Seattle, Washington, April. Greenfield, T.B. (1993) Organization theory as ideology, in T. Greenfield and P. Ribbins (eds), Greenfield on Educational Administration: Towards a Humane Science (pp. 75–91). London: Routledge. (First published 1977.) Greenleaf, R.K. (1977) Servant Leadership. New York: Paulist Press. Hales, C. (1993) Managing through Organisation. London: Routledge. Hajnal, V., sackney, L., Walker, K. and Shakotko, D. (1997) Institutionalization and school leadership: successful and unsuccessful efforts, paper presented to the annual meeting of the Canadian Association for the Study of Educational Administration, St. John’s, Newfoundland, June. Hallinger, P. and Leithwood, K. (1996) Culture and educational administration: a case of finding out what you don’t know you don’t know, Journal of Educational Administration, 34(5), 98–116. Hargreaves, A. (1997) From reform to renewal: a new deal for a new age, in A. Hargreaves and R. Evans (eds), Beyond Educational Reform: Bringing Teachers Back In (pp. 105–25). Buckingham: Open University Press. Hart, A.W. (1994) Creating teacher leadership roles, Educational Administration Quarterly, 30(4), 472–97. Heck, R.H. (1996) Leadership and culture: conceptual and methodological issues in comparing models across cultural settings, Journal of Educational Administration, 34(5), 74–97. Hersey, P. and Blanchard, K.H. (1977) Management of Organizational Behavior: Utilizing Human Resources, 3rd edn. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Hodgkinson, C. (1996) Administrative Philosophy: Values and Motivations in Administrative Life. Oxford: Pergamon. Hooker, R. (n.d.) Chinese Philosophy: Yin and Yang. Available: http://www.wsu.edu: 8080/~dee/CHPHIL/YINYANG.HTM Hughes, L.W. (1994) The Principal as Leader. New York: Macmillan. Kelley, C. (2000) From policy to performance: weaving policy and leadership strategies to improve student achievement, in B.A. Jones (ed.), Educational leadership: Policy Dimensions in the 21st Century (pp. 71–82). Stamford, CT: Ablex. Lambert, L., Walker, D., Zimmerman, D., Cooper, J., Lambert, M., Gardner, M. and Slack, P.F. (1995) The Constructivist Leader. New York: Teachers College Press. Leithwood, K. (1994) Leadership for school restructuring, Educational Administration Quarterly, 30(4), 498–518. Leonard, P. (1999) Understanding the dimensions of school culture: value orientations and value conflicts, Journal of Educational Administration and Foundations, 13(2), 27–53. Lezotte, L.W. (1989) School improvement based on the effective schools research, paper presented at the Annaul Meeting of the International Congress for School Effectiveness, Rotterdam, the Netherlands, January. Lugg, C.A. and Boyd, W.L. (1993) Leadership for collaboration: reducing risk and fostering resilience. Phi Delta Kappan, 75(3), 253–6, 258.

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McGee Banks, C.A. (2000) Gender and race as factors in educational leadership and development, in The Jossey-Bass Reader on Educational Leadership (pp. 217–56). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Miklos, E. (1983) Alternate images of the administrator, Canadian Administrator, 22(7), 1–6. Morgan, G. (1997) Imaginization: New Mindsets for Seeing, Organizing, and Managing. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler. Murphy, J., Hallinger, P. and Mitman, A. (1983) Problems with research on educational leadership: Issues to be addressed, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 5(3), 297–305. Ogawa, R.T. and Bossert, S.T. (1995) Leadership as an organizational quality, Educational Administration Quarterly, 31(2), 224–43. Patterson, J.L. (1993) Leadership for Tomorrow’s Schools. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Simon, H.A. (1960) The New Science of Management Decision. New York: Harper and Row. Simons, G.F., Vazquez, C. and Harris, P.R. (1993) Transcultural Leadership: Empowering the Diverse Workforce. Houston, TX: Gulf Publishing. Smith, L.T. (2001) Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Dunedin, NZ: University of Otago Press. Smith, S.C. and Piele, P.K. (1997) School Leadership: Handbook for Excellence. Eugene, OR: ERIC Clearinghouse on Educational Management. Thom, D.J. (2001) The World Leadership Opportunity: Resolved Christianity and One Education System. London: Ming-Ai Institute. Wallace, M. (2000) Integrating cultural and political perspectives: the case of school restructuring in England, Educational Administration Quarterly, 36(4), 608–32.

2 Embracing Uncertainty: Organizing and Leading to Enhance the Knowledgeability and Capability of Teachers RODNEY T. OGAWA

INTRODUCTION In this chapter, I consider the institutional and organizational context of teaching, explaining that teachers work as direct agents of the social institution of education. Teachers, thus, stand at the boundary between social order, as defined by institutions and reflected in the structures of school organization, and the potential chaos, or uncertainty, that would result if they failed in their mission. I then explore the complexity and thus uncertainty that teachers encounter in deploying a multidimensional knowledge base. I close by considering how we might conceptualize school organization and leadership in ways that better accommodate the presence of uncertainty in teaching. THE INSTITUTIONAL CONTEXT OF TEACHING Institutional theory provides two opposing accounts of the relationship between organizational structure and technology. The first emphasizes factors that are internal to organizations in explaining that structure is only loosely related to activity. The second emphasizes the institutional environment in explaining how organizational structure constrains technology. Decoupling structure from activity The institutional account that has been most widely aired in the educational administration literature explains that organizations’ structural features are only loosely associated with their core technologies. This account emphasizes conditions and agendas that are internal to organizations: the absence of a clear technology and the need to maintain legitimacy.

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Absence of a clear technology

Institutional theory explains that organizations do not always adopt structures in order to enhance the effectiveness or efficiency of their technical operations. Instead, they sometimes symbolically adopt structural features that mirror institutions (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983; Scott, 1987; Zucker, 1987), which are ‘cognitive, normative, and regulative structures and activities that provide stability and meaning to social behavior’ (Scott, 1995, p. 33). Some institutions specify appropriate organizational purposes as well as legitimate means for attaining them (Meyer and Rowan, 1977; Scott, 1987; Zucker, 1987). Most discussions of highly institutionalized organizations begin with the absence of a clear technology (DiMaggio, 1988; DiMaggio and Powell, 1983; Meyer and Rowan, 1977). For, in the absence of technical bases for determining structural efficiencies, organizations develop structures to mirror institutions. By doing so, they can gain legitimacy with stakeholders in their environments without necessarily having to demonstrate the effectiveness or efficiency of their technical operations (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983; Meyer and Rowan, 1977; Scott, 1987; Zucker, 1987). Scholars of educational administration generally agree that teaching is the core technology of school organizations. And, at least since Cohen, March and Olsen (1972) modelled decision-making in organized anarchies, it has been axiomatic that teaching is an unclear technology: a process whose cause–effect relations are poorly understood (Meyer and Rowan, 1977). Thus, according to this institutional account, teaching is a largely barren seedbed for the structure of school organizations. Decoupling to maintain legitimacy

Institutional theory also explains that highly institutionalized organizations engage in two forms of decoupling (Meyer and Rowan, 1977). First, they decouple structures adopted for institutional purposes in order to respond to competing and even contradictory environmental demands. Second, school organizations decouple administrative structure from the activity of teaching in order to avoid the loss of legitimacy that could result if stakeholders found that teachers were not complying with programmes or policies. As Meyer and Rowan (1977) observe, this would explain the relative infrequency with which administrators supervise teachers to ensure their compliance with the many programmes adopted to conform to environmental demands and explain the widely observed failure of institutionally derived structures to affect teaching and learning. This account, however, does not square with substantial evidence that unambiguous directives from the institutional environment result in organizational structures that influence the work of teachers (Rowan and Miskel, 1999). The impact of structure on activity A second institutional account emphasizes the linkages between the institutional environment, the structure of school organizations and teaching. It

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begins, as does the first, with school organizations adopting structures to mirror institutions in the environment. But, then the two accounts diverge with the second explaining that these structures constrain and, thus, influence teaching. Institutional theory was developed, in part, to oppose the dominant orientation of the American social sciences, which emphasize internally derived goals as the motive for action (Meyer, Boli and Thomas, 1987). Institutional theory stresses the influence of external influences, namely institutions, on the behaviour of both individual and collective actors. It is exactly this view on which the second institutional account of the relationship between the structure of school organizations and teaching builds. Highly institutionalized organizations

Like the neo-institutionalists cited above, Selznick (1957) explained that organizations are more or less institutionalized. He contrasts ‘organization’ with ‘institution’, defining organization ‘as an expendable tool, a rational instrument engineered to do a job’ and institution as ‘more nearly a product of social needs and pressures’ (Selznick, 1957, p. 5). Selznick further claims that highly institutionalized organizations – or, simply institutions – are ‘infused with value’ because they embody or symbolize a community’s aspirations and sense of identity. Clearly, by Selznick’s conceptualization, schools are highly institutionalized organizations. They may, in fact, approximate the ‘ideal’ of institutionality. For, public schools are clearly characterized by the two conditions that contribute to a high degree of institutionalization: ambiguous and contested goals and an unclear technology. This has important implications for the work done in schools. Organized agents of a social institution

Stinchcombe (1965) observes that special purpose organizations in modern societies take over much of the function of social institutions. In general terms, social institutions are complexes of roles that fulfil needs or functions of society and thus serve as the building blocks of social integration (Parsons, 1951). Institutions, thus, provide the basis for social order. One such institution is education. While the institution of education is enacted by many agents, schools in the USA have taken over much of society’s knowledge-transmission function (Coleman, 1987). Schools are organizations that contribute to the maintenance of social cohesion, or order, by morally and technically socializing people who are not integrated into existing cultural, political and economic structures (Bidwell, 1965). Thus, schools adopt structures that mirror society’s values to accomplish more than simply gaining legitimacy with external stakeholders, as neoinstitutionalists tend to emphasize. Schools are also organized around social values in order to impart them to students. Schools, therefore, respond to institutions by developing structures – including curriculum guidelines, programmes and even job titles – to shape both what is taught and how it is taught. Consequently, social values permeate the technical core of school organizations.

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Against this institutional backdrop, teachers are directly involved in socialization and knowledge transmission. They are institutional workers, tending the boundary between the collective order set by institutions and embodied in the structure of school organizations and the uncertainty that lies beyond. Thus, teachers are direct agents of social integration and order. TEACHING AS INSTITUTIONAL WORK This characterization of teaching is consistent with the natural systems perspective from which institutional theory springs, because it treats teaching as a technology, or work, that is socially constructed (Scott, 1992). It is derived not so much from the material contingencies of production, as posited by rational theorists, but from the social and political context of school organizations and their institutional environments. Organizational politics and the institutional environment constrain pedagogical design and the selection of content. Dominant political coalitions adopt favoured practices and values and embed them in the structure of school organizations. And, the institutional environment, typically in the form of the state or professions, legitimates some pedagogy and curriculum and not others (Scott, 1992). Teachers, however, do not simply enact the technologies that have been designed or adopted and embedded in the structure of schools. In Giddens’s (1984) terms, individual actors are both ‘knowledgeable’ and ‘capable’. They are knowledgeable: They act in ways that they know or believe will produce a particular outcome. Moreover, they are capable: They can and do select from among alternative acts. This suggests that, to understand the productive processes of highly institutionalized organizations, analysts should tap the knowledge and capability of individuals who are directly involved. This, however, is largely missing in the literature on school organization. Organizational analysts who characterize teaching simply as an unclear technology approach the study of school organization as outsiders and largely ignore the perspectives of the people who work in schools. This is evident in their failure to cite research on either what teachers do or how teachers view their work. Assuming that, in Giddens’s terms, teachers are capable and knowledgeable, examining how teachers view their work may provide important insights to the core technology of school organization. TEACHER KNOWLEDGE Research on ‘teacher knowledge’ attempts to yield a view of teaching through the eyes of teachers, themselves. Fenstermacher (1994) identifies at least four research programmes on teacher knowledge, which differ conceptually and methodologically. These programmes include bodies of work that examine teacher narratives, pedagogical content knowledge reflective practice and teacher researchers.

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Reacting in part to the potential distortions that some critics claim can result from applying theory to research on teaching, one programme of research has sought expressly to uncover the rich and complex knowledge that teachers possess (Clandinin, 1986; Clandinin and Connelly, 1987; Connelly and Clandinin, 1988; 1995; Elbaz, 1983; 1991). Researchers who work from this perspective gain access to teacher knowledge through teachers’ narratives and stories and from the images that teachers associate with their work (Clandinin, 1986; Elbaz, 1983). Another programme of research was initiated to address limitations of research on teaching effectiveness, which ignored such critical features of teaching as classroom context, student characteristics and curriculum content. In an influential essay, Shulman (1987) calls for a thoroughgoing examination of the teaching knowledge base. He suggests that at the intersection of general pedagogical knowledge and subject matter knowledge stands pedagogical content knowledge, which he claims is the special province of teachers. In subsequent research, Shulman and his associates began studying the impact of subject matter knowledge on the planning and instruction of novice secondary teachers (Grossman, 1990; Grossman, Wilson and Shulman, 1989). They found that teachers’ content knowledge affected not only what teachers taught, but also how they taught it. While these two research programmes represent contrasting conceptual and methodological approaches to the study of teacher knowledge, they reveal similar knowledge domains, which demonstrate that teaching is indeed constrained by its institutional and organizational context but also very much the product of teachers’ knowledgeability and capability. The institutional press on teachers Research on teacher narrative and pedagogical content knowledge make it clear that teaching is constrained by the institutional environment and the structures that school organizations develop in responding to that environment. For example, Shulman (1987) lists educational contexts as one category of teacher knowledge. He also notes that one of the four major sources of teaching’s knowledge base lies in the settings of institutionalized educational processes. The literature on teacher narrative is even more explicit about the presence of the institutional environment as a backdrop to teaching. It notes that teachers are affected by policies and programmes established by the school, district and beyond (Elbaz, 1983). Clandinin and Connelly (1995) characterize this as the teachers’ ‘knowledge landscape’, which includes sacred and secret stories. Sacred stories emanate from policy-makers and academics. This is consistent with institutional theory, which identifies government and the professions, including the universities which train professionals and provide them with much of their specialized knowledge, as the most powerful institutional agents (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983; Scott, 1987). Teachers tell ‘secret stories’ about

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their classroom lives. In between, teachers tell ‘cover stories’ to obscure inconsistencies between the secret and the sacred. The presence of cover stories reveals that the account provided by institutional theory regarding the decoupling of structure from activity is incomplete. Institutional theory explains that school organizations decouple structure from the activity of teachers to maintain legitimacy (Meyer and Rowan, 1977). Research on teacher knowledge adds that teachers are left to resolve inconsistencies and even contradictions between the institutions to which school organizations respond and the exigencies of their classrooms, implying one form of capability. Teachers as knowledgeable actors Research on teacher narrative and pedagogical content knowledge also reveal that teachers are knowledgeable: They act in ways they know or believe will produce particular outcomes (Giddens, 1981). This is first evident in teachers’ sense of purpose. Inquiry on teacher narrative suggests that teachers possess fairly clear, although not necessarily well articulated, ideas regarding their purposes and intentions in the classroom (Clandinin and Connelly, 1987). Similarly, Shulman (1987) identifies educational purposes as one of the categories of teaching’s knowledge base. That teachers are knowledgeable is also demonstrated by evidence that they know how to attain their purposes. Narratives reveal that teachers have notions about what instructional content will fulfil their purposes (Clandinin, 1986; Clandinin and Connelly, 1987; Elbaz, 1983). Research on pedagogical content knowledge shows that teachers’ content knowledge affects their pedagogical choices and the purposes they pursue. Teacher narratives also disclose the intensely social nature of teaching. They indicate that teachers utilize social relations to accomplish their instructional purposes. Elbaz (1983) indicates that Sarah, an English teacher, used her knowledge to shape a social world in which ‘the kids learn from the human experience of being in the classroom and the way an adult reacts to them and helps to create an environment where they react to each other’ (Elbaz, 1983, p. 88). Clandinin (1986) similarly reports that social relationships emerged as a basic structure for giving an account of the two teachers in her study, leading her to conclude that teaching is a ‘social business’. Finally, research on teacher narratives and pedagogical content knowledge indicates that teachers possess a complex knowledge base. Taken together, these two bodies of work suggest that the knowledge base of teaching resides in seven domains: 1. ends/purposes/values; 2. self; 3. students/learners; 4. context/milieu; 5. curriculum/materials/development; 6. content/subject matter; and 7. pedagogy/ instruction Shulman and his associates add an eighth domain that lies at the intersection of content and pedagogy, which they characterize as pedagogical content knowledge. The essential point is that teachers draw from knowledge in each of these domains in their work; they are knowledgeable.

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Teachers as capable actors The literature on teacher knowledge also demonstrates that teachers are capable: They can and do select from among alternative acts (Giddens, 1981). Moreover, the array of options from which teachers make their selections is vast and highly complex. McDonald (1992) observes that teaching rests at the centre of three points that form a triangle: teacher, students and subject. He posits that the craft of teaching emerges from the uncertainty of joining these three elements. We have seen that it is actually more complex than McDonald indicates. Teachers draw on knowledge in eight, not three, domains. Teachers not only select from among alternatives in each domain, but condition each choice by the choices they make in other domains. They must take stock of themselves, their purpose, their students or a particular student, the context, curriculum, subject matter and pedagogy, and the mix of these elements. As the teacher in Elbaz’s (1983) study found, teaching can be a chaotic activity, with a multiplicity of events, or stimuli, to which the teacher must attend, not serially but simultaneously. Moreover, the findings of research on teacher knowledge suggest that teaching engages the immediate contingencies of the classroom (Clandinin, 1986; Elbaz, 1983; Shulman, 1987). Thus, in acting capably, teachers encounter great complexity and immediacy, two conditions that foster uncertainty. Citing Dewey (1929), McDonald (1992) warns that we should not view this uncertainty as a problem that must necessarily be eliminated. Rather, he explains that the uncertainty should be acknowledged and even preserved because it ‘saves a place for novelty and genuine growth and change’ (McDonald, 1992, p. 7); that is, it saves a place for learning. The problematic nature of uncertainty

McDonald’s admonition confronts a limitation of traditional conceptualizations of organization which emphasize, not the accommodation of uncertainty arising from complexity, but its elimination. Boulding (1956) conceptualized a hierarchy of systems, which range in complexity from the static structures of level one to the social systems of level eight. He lamented that most social science theories operate at level two (simple, clockwork-like systems) and level three (cybernetic, or control systems) while social phenomena actually operate at level eight (multicephalous systems). Building on this point, Pondy and Mitroff (1979, p. 99) argue that leading conceptualizations of organization adopt a control system rather than an open system perspective and thus stress the ‘problematic nature of uncertainty for the organizations’. The treatment of uncertainty as problematic is reflected in the prevailing orientation of the educational profession and policy community toward instructional improvement (McDonald, 1992). Researchers strive to determine the elements of effective teaching and effective schools, seeking generic

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processes and qualities that underlie instructional effectiveness across settings and teachers (Shulman, 1987). Rationalistic optimism has been buoyed by advances in research on human cognition (Rowan, 1995). Teacher educators sometimes promote sanitized depictions of teaching to ease novices through their first encounters with its uncertainty (McDonald, 1992). Reformers restructure schools to encourage particular changes in teaching (Elmore, 1990; McDonald, 1992). This perspective is being challenged. The challenge is particularly significant because some of its leading proponents are scholars whose research was grounded in the assumption that instructional improvement would result from the reduction of uncertainty. For example, Clark (1988), whose research once held the promise of revealing how successful teachers think, lamented that research would never produce such definitive results. Citing the many sources and various forms of teachers’ implicit theories, he concludes: ‘Research on teacher thinking does not promise to discover a generically effective method or set of techniques for dealing with uncertainty, complexity, or dilemmas. By their very nature these qualities defy the quest for a technical fix’ (Clark, 1988, p. 10). By acknowledging that to improve teaching will require more than generic fixes because of its complexity and uncertainty, he implies that improvement will mean enhancing the knowledgeability and capability of teachers. More recently, Elmore, Peterson and McCarthey (1996; Peterson, McCarthey and Elmore, 1996) examine how changes in the structure of three elementary schools affect the instructional practices of teachers. They report that the link is ‘weak, problematic and indirect’ (Elmore, Peterson and McCarthey, 1996, p. 237) and thus conclude that changing the practice of teachers requires enhancing their knowledge and skills rather than restructuring schools. That is, it requires enhancing knowledgeability and capability. Elmore, Peterson and McCarthey urge researchers to determine how people learn new ways to do established tasks and the organizational conditions that facilitate the acquisition of knowledge and skills. Elmore, Peterson and McCarthey’s (1996) advice places the issue exactly where this chapter began. Given the conceptual arguments that I have raised here, the questions I originally posed should be modified to ask: how can school organizations be structured to enhance the knowledgeability and capability of teachers? How can leadership contribute to organizing for knowledgeability and capability? ORGANIZING AROUND TEACHING In considering how schools might be organized around teaching, we confront the apparent contradiction outlined above: organizing is aimed at reducing uncertainty, while teaching necessarily embraces uncertainty. This suggests a point of departure for exploring how to organize around teaching lies in identifying the types of uncertainty that must be managed for teaching to occur.

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Research on teacher knowledge informs the discussion by revealing that teaching is shaped by two sets of constraints: (a) the institutional press on schools and (b) teachers’ knowledgeability and capability. Organizing in response to the institutional press Research on teacher narrative and pedagogical content knowledge indicates that teachers are agents of moral and technical socialization (Bidwell, 1965) and, therefore, are constrained by the institutions, or cultural rules, in the environment and by the structures that school organizations develop in response to the environment (Clandinin and Connelly, 1995; Elbaz, 1983; Shulman, 1987). Government and the professions play central roles in shaping institutions (Scott, 1992). This suggests that one dimension of organizing for teaching would include structures for monitoring and responding to educational policies and professional developments. School organizations are well organized to respond to the governmental influences. School districts, for instance, regularly monitor state and federal legislation. They react to state and federal initiatives by developing structures, or getting organized, to shape what is taught and how it is taught by adopting curriculum guidelines, textbook adoptions, categorical programmes, and the like. Local interests also shape school organizations. Schools embody or symbolize, as Selznick (1957) observes, a community’s aspirations and sense of identity. Local boards of education, whose members adopt policies and programmes that reflect local values, govern public schools. Educational reform in the 1980s took this a step further by ‘restructuring’ the governance of schools. Site-based management delegated decision-making authority from district boards to school councils, which involve site administrators, teachers and parents. Reformers reasoned that individuals directly involved in schools and the communities they serve are best able to determine personnel, programmes and budgets. Research, however, indicates that the alteration of school and governance structures did little to affect the instructional practices of teachers and, thus, had little impact on the academic performance of students (Elmore, Peterson and McCarthy, 1996). Indeed, research on teacher narrative suggests that teachers conceal and obscure inconsistencies between policies and their classroom lives. Schools and districts are less well organized to respond to the educational profession, which is represented for the most part by professional organizations and universities. Certainly, school districts are organized to manage relations with unions that represent teachers in negotiating for compensation and work conditions. But, teacher contracts rarely attend to issues of curriculum content or instructional methods. Districts also host professional development activities, often presenting workshops that feature university-based researchers or external consultants who speak on timely instructional topics. Beyond such events, teachers, administrators and other professionals are left largely on

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their own to learn about recent developments in their respective areas of expertise. They attend university courses, teacher institutes and professional meetings, sometimes with the support and blessing of their school districts but often at their own expense. Unfortunately, research suggests that professional development activities that are not tied to the curriculum that teachers actually teach have little impact on what and how they teach (Cohen and Ball, 1990; Cohen and Hill, 2000; 2001). The failure of existing governance structures and professional development programmes to affect the instructional practice of teachers marks their inability to enhance the knowledgeability and capability of teachers. State and federal policies and programmes can fail to resonate with local values and sentiments. Consequently, some reformers have called for reducing the regulatory authority of states by exposing schools to market forces through the introduction of vouchers, which families can ply, or the provision of charters, which schools can obtain. However, the market would replace democratic discourse as the vehicle for determining the values that will be reflected in the curriculum and instruction to which students will be exposed and that teachers would enact. Professional development programmes similarly miss the mark with teachers because they often fail to address the immediate context in which teachers work. Thus, many educators argue for professional development that provides teachers with opportunities to study and learn the curriculum that their students will actually use (Cohen and Hill, 2001, p. 2). However, many proponents of this approach link professional development to the implementation of statewide curriculum reform, thus creating the potential gap between centralized regulation and local norms. Thus, local context is crucial in considering how to structure school organizations to monitor and respond to governmental and professional influences in ways that will contribute to enhancing the knowledgeability and capability of teachers. Educators, including teachers, must join their communities in forming norms and expectations for schools and their students. And, as many scholars suggest, educators must join professional networks both within and outside their schools to define and confront key curricular and instructional issues. Schools must be organized to facilitate such community building and professional networking. Time and other resources must be allocated to enable and encourage this work. Organizing to enhance teacher knowledgeability and capability The literature on teacher knowledge reveals that teaching is also shaped by teacher knowledgeability and capability. That is, teachers act in ways they know or believe will produce particular outcomes and can and do select from alternative acts (Giddens, 1981). Because enhancing both of these capacities would require increasing rather than reducing complexity, traditional conceptualizations of organization, which emphasize uncertainty reduction, may not

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provide an appropriate framework for considering how to organize to enhance teacher knowledgeability and capability. Thus, I turn to the literature on organizational learning because it focuses directly and expressly on the paradox of organizing for uncertainty. As so often is the case in organization theory, little consensus has coalesced around the concept of learning. This is reflected in the many definitions that have been proposed (Raitt, 1995). What is salient to the present discussion is that some of these definitions reflect the notions of knowledgeability, capability and the role of social interaction in shaping them. For example, Levitt and March (1991) suggest ‘knowledgeability’ when they describe learning as the encoding of inferences from the past in routines that guide behavior. Huber (1991) implies ‘capability’ in explaining that learning occurs when an organization increases the range of its potential behaviors by processing information. And, Raitt (1995, p. 72) suggests the social nature of organizational learning by observing that it occurs when people draw on their combined experiences, capabilities and perspectives to ‘acquire information from the environment and generate appropriate responses to organizational issues’. Taken together, these points suggest that organizing to enhance the knowledgeability and capability of teachers, which necessitates learning, must include collective activity. This is wholly in keeping with the current emphasis on learning communities and teacher networks as vehicles for the professional development of teachers (Darling-Hammond, 1994; Darling-Hammond and McLaughlin, 1995; Lieberman, 1995; Talbert and McLaughlin, 1994). Raitt’s emphasis on the social nature of organizational learning foreshadows another key point on which theorists differ: the appropriate level of analysis. Some theorists eschew the individual level, arguing that organization is the appropriate unit of analysis (Huber, 1991). Others emphasize the learning of individuals within organizations (Raitt, 1995). Weick and Westley (1996, p. 442) attempt to resolve the debate by arguing that ‘social learning processes have something to teach us about individual learning as well as vice versa’. In advancing their position, Weick and Westley (1996) suggest focusing on organizations’ cultures (Cook and Yanow, 1991) to draw inferences about their learning. Specifically, they propose that organizational knowledge, or the content which learning changes, is reflected in language, artefacts and co-ordinated action routines. Finally, Weick and Westley (1996) make the interesting observation that organizational learning is an oxymoron. Organizing, as I noted above, has been conceptualized as the reduction of uncertainty. Learning, on the other hand, requires the presence of uncertainty. Weick and Westley (1996, p. 441) ‘treat occasions which juxtapose order and disorder as social spaces where learning is possible’. This suggests a very different way of conceptualizing organization to enhance the capacity of teachers. Currently, the emphasis is placed on determining ‘best practices’ and developing effective methods for disseminating information about them. That is, we seek to maximize order. Weick and Westley would have us seek, instead, those social spaces in schools

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where teachers, administrators and others can wrestle between order and disorder. The emerging literature on organizational learning, thus, suggests three parameters for organizing to enhance teacher knowledgeability and capability. First, the cultural norms of schools are more likely than formal, organizational structures to provide a sense of order that does not eradicate the uncertainties that characterize teaching and learning. For example, schoolwide norms that emphasize academic achievement and equity of educational opportunity leave teachers to draw on their full instructional repertoires, where prescriptive instructional programmes reduce teachers to reciting scripted lessons and students to echoing ‘right’ answers. Second, organization that enhances teacher knowledgeability and capability would facilitate the capacity of individuals, such as teachers and administrators, to influence the organizational level, such as school and district. This, in fact, is exactly the point that Elmore, Peterson and McCarthey (1996, p. 239) raise in noting, ‘It is just as plausible for changes in practice to lead to changes in structure and vice versa’. Third, organizing to build teacher capacity would present teachers with both order and disorder, or organization and uncertainty. Most examples that come to mind suggest that order is provided, as noted above, by the institutional environment in the form of government policies, professional norms and/or local community preferences. Uncertainty necessarily arises from enacting these influences in the content and practices of instruction. For example, curriculum standards present teachers with order by specifying common sets of educational outcomes. Disorder, or uncertainty, is introduced when teachers are faced with having to devise instructional practices that will enable diverse students to attain standards. School organizations, thus, might engage groups of teachers to discuss how they are approaching this challenge, sharing what works and what does not, thus building knowledgeability, and broadening instructional repertoires, thus enhancing capability. These three parameters suggest that schools can be organized around the knowledgeability and capability of teachers by providing conditions that are consistent with the notion of professional communities as vehicles for promoting the professionalism of educators (Darling-Hammond, 1994; DarlingHammond and McLaughlin, 1995; Lieberman, 1995; Talbert and McLaughlin, 1994). Such communities would engage teachers in sustained, collaborative efforts to confront the intersection of what research on teacher narrative refer to as ‘sacred’ stories arising in the institutional environment and ‘secret’ stories of teachers’ lives in their classrooms, that is, where teachers wrestle with the uncertainties of enacting the organization imposed by policy, the profession and local communities. Discourse would come to be governed by norms that arise within each professional community. And, the communities would be informed by the experiences of individual teachers, which consequently would shape the cultural norms and even the formal structures of schools and districts.

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Leadership for knowledgeability and capability Selznick (1957) notes that the conceptualization of leadership is necessarily rooted in the conceptualization of organization. In this chapter, I have begun to develop a conceptualization of organizing around the knowledgeability and capability of teachers. What are its implications for conceptualizing leadership in schools? To answer that question, I turn to the concept of leadership as an organizational quality, which colleagues and I previously reintroduced (Ogawa and Bossert, 1995; Pounder, Ogawa and Adams, 1995). The concept of leadership as a quality of organizations rather than individuals has a long history. Chester Barnard (1938) implied that any member of an organization might exert leadership by noting that leadership is not confined to executives. Thompson (1967) explained that leadership courses throughout organizations, flowing both up and down the hierarchy. Researchers at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research argued explicitly that leadership is an organizational quality and therefore can and should be measured at the organizational unit of analysis. The view of organizational leadership is consistent with a view of schools as highly institutionalized organizations and, thus, with organizing around the knowledgeability and capability of teachers. As an organization-wide characteristic, leadership affects the performance of organizations by shaping structures, which are the regularized patterns of action of and interaction between participants. As Ogawa and Bossert (1995, p. 238) assert, ‘In a word, leadership is organizing’. By developing structures that reflect institutions, or cultural rules, leadership enables organizations to manage relations with external stakeholders and gain social legitimacy. These structures serve as foci for symbolic activities that shape and reinforce shared norms and values, which can produce solidarity that leads to co-ordinated activity. Thus, in another word, leadership is cultural. All members of organizations can draw on individual resources, such as knowledge and skill, or resources to which they have access from their positions in the organization to shape organizational structures. Thus, leadership is not the province of a few individuals in certain parts of the organization. Leadership, instead, is organizational. This conceptualization of leadership reflects the three parameters that characterize the organization of schools around teacher knowledgeability and capability. Leadership is cultural, developing structures on which symbolic activities focus to shape and reinforce norms and values that guide the relations and interactions that occur in professional communities, both within schools and between schools and the profession. Culture produces group solidarity and, consequently, co-ordinated action. This type of leadership provides organization, or certainty, but does not eliminate the complexity and uncertainty that teaching embraces, enabling teachers to work as members of professional communities in confronting the uncertainties they face enacting curriculum content and instructional practice. Finally, along with other participants in school organizations – including administrators, students and

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parents – individual teachers and professional communities provide leadership by developing structures that can affect all levels of school organization. REFERENCES Barnard, C.I. (1938) Functions of the Executive. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bidwell, C.E. (1965) The school as formal organization, in J.G. March (ed.), Handbook of Organizations (pp. 972–1022). Chicago: Rand-McNally. Boulding, K. (1956) General systems theory – the skeleton of science, Management Science, 2, 197–208. Clandinin, D.J. (1986) Classroom Practice: Teacher Images in Action. London: Falmer. Clandinin, D.J. and Connelly, F.M. (1987) Teachers’ personal knowledge: what counts as personal in studies of the personal, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 19, 487–500. Clandinin, D.J. and Connelly, F.M. (1995) Teachers’ Professional Knowledge Landscapes. New York: Teachers College Press. Clark, C.M. (1988) Asking the right questions about teacher preparation: contributions of research on teacher thinking, Educational Researcher, 17, 5–12. Cohen, D.K. and Ball, D.L. (1990) Policy and practice: an overview, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 12, 347–53. Cohen, D.K. and Hill, H.C. (2000) Instructional policy and classroom performance: the mathematics reform in California, Teachers College Record, 102, 294–343. Cohen, D.K. and Hill, H.C. (2001) Learning Policy: When State Education Reform Works. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Cohen, M.D., March, J.G. and Olsen, J.P. (1972) A garbage can model of organizational choice, Administrative Science Quarterly, 17, 1–25. Coleman, J.S. (1987) Families and schools, Educational Researcher, 16, 32–8. Connelly, F.M. and Clandinin, D.J. (1988) Teachers as Curriculum Planners. New York: Teachers College Press. Connelly, F.M. and Clandinin, D.J. (1995) Teachers’ professional knowledge landscapes: secret, sacred and cover stories, in D.J. Clandinin and F.M. Connelly (eds), Teachers’ Professional Knowledge Landscapes (pp. 3–15). New York: Teachers College Press. Cook, S.D.N. and Yanow, D. (1991) Culture and organizational learning, in M.D. Cohen and L.S. Sproull (eds), Organizational Learning (pp. 430–59). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Darling-Hammond, L. (1994) Developing professional development schools: early lessons, challenge and promise, in L. Darling-Hammond (ed.), Professional Development Schools: Schools for Developing a Profession. New York: Teachers College Press. Darling-Hammond, L. and McLaughlin, M.W. (1995) Policies that support professional development in an era of reform, Phi Delta Kappan, 76(8), 597–605. Dewey, J. (1929) The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action. New York: Minton, Balch. DiMaggio, P.J. (1988) Interest and agency in institutional theory, in L.G. Zucker (ed.), Institutional Patterns in Organizations: Culture and Environments (pp. 3–21). Cambridge, MA: Ballinger.

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DiMaggio, P.J. and Powell, W.W. (1983) The iron cage revisited: institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields, American Sociological Review, 48, 147–60. Elbaz, F. (1983) Teacher Thinking: A Study of Practical Knowledge. London: Croom Helm. Elbaz, F. (1991) Research on teachers’ knowledge: the evolution of a discourse, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 23, 1–19. Elmore, R.F. (1990) Introduction: On changing the structure of public schools, in R.F. Elmore (ed.), Restructuring Schools: The Next Generation of Educational Reform (pp. 1–28). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Elmore, R.F., Peterson, P.L. and McCarthey (1996) Restructuring in the Classroom: Teaching, Learning and School Organization. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Fenstermacher, G.D. (1994) The knower and the known: the nature of knowledge in research on teaching, in L. Darling-Hammond (ed.), Review of Research in Education. Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association. Giddens, A. (1981) Agency, institution, and time-space analysis, in K. Knorr-Cetina and A.V. Cicourel (eds), Advances in Social Theory and Methodology: Toward an Integration of Micro and Macro-sociologies (pp. 161–74). Boston, MA: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Giddens, A. (1984) The Constitution of Society. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Grossman, P.L. (1990) The Making of a Teacher: Teacher Knowledge and Teacher Education. New York: Teachers College Press. Grossman, P.L., Wilson, S.M. and Shulman, L.S. (1989) Teachers of substance: subject matter knowledge for teaching, in M. Reynolds (ed.), Knowledge Base for the Beginning Teacher (pp. 23–36). Oxford: Pergamon Press. Huber, G.P. (1991) Organizational learning: the contributing processes and the literatures, in M.D. Cohen and L.S. Sproull (eds), Organizational Learning (pp. 124–62). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Levitt, B. and March, J.G. (1991) Organizational learning, in M.D. Cohen and L.S. Sproull (eds), Organizational Learning (pp. 516–40). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Lieberman, A. (1995) Practices that support teacher development: transforming conceptions of professional learning, Phi Delta Kappan, 76(8), 591–6. McDonald, J.P. (1992) Teaching: Making Sense of an Uncertain Craft. New York: Teachers College Press. Meyer, J.W. and Rowan, B. (1977) Institutionalized organizations: formal structure as myth and ceremony, American Journal of Sociology, 83, 440–63. Meyer, J.W., Boli, J. and Thomas, G.M. (1987) Ontology and rationalization in western cultural account, in G.M. Thomas, J.W. Meyer, F.O. Ramirez and J. Boli (eds), Institutional Structure: Constituting State, Society, and the Individual (pp. 12–40). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Ogawa, R.T. and Bossert, S.T. (1995) Leadership as an organizational quality, Educational Administration Quarterly, 31, 224–43. Parsons, T. (1951) The Social System. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Peterson, P.L., McCarthey, S.J. and Elmore, R.F. (1996) Learning from school restructuring, American Educational Research Journal, 33, 119–53. Pondy, L.R. and Mitroff, I.I. (1979) Beyond open system models of organization, in B.M. Staw (ed.), Research in Organizational Behavior, Vol. 1 (pp. 3–39). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.

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Pounder, D.G., Ogawa, R.T. and Adams, E.A. (1995) Leadership as an organization-wide phenomena: its impact on school performance, Educational Administration Quarterly, 31, 564–88. Raitt, E. (1995) Schools as learning organizations, in S.B. Bacharach and B. Mundell (eds), Images of Schools (pp. 71–107). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press. Rowan, B. (1995) Learning, teaching and educational administration: toward a research agenda, Educational Administration Quarterly, 31, 344–54. Rowan, B. and Miskel, C.G. (1999) Institutional theory and the study of educational organizations, in J. Murphy and K.S. Louis (eds), Handbook of Research on Education Administration (pp. 359–83). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Scott, W.R. (1987) The adolescence of institutional theory, Administrative Science Quarterly, 32, 493–511. Scott, W.R. (1992) Organizations: Rational, Natural, and Open Systems. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Scott, W.R. (1995) Institutions and Organizations. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Selznick, P. (1957) Leadership in Administration. New York: Harper and Row. Shulman, L.S. (1987) Knowledge and teaching: foundations of the new reform. Harvard Educational Review, 57, 1–22. Stinchcombe, A.L. (1965) Social structure and organizations, in J.G. March (ed.), Handbook of Organizations (pp. 142–93). Chicago: Rand McNally. Talbert, J.E. and McLaughlin, J.W. (1994) Teacher professionalism in local school contexts, American Journal of Education, 102(2), 123–53. Thompson, J.D. (1967) Organizations in Action. New York: McGraw-Hill. Weick, K.E. and Westley, F. (1996) Organizational learning: affirming an oxymoron, in S.R. Clegg, C. Hardy and W.R. Nord (eds), Handbook of Organization Studies (pp. 440–58). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Zucker, L.G. (1987) Institutional theories of organization, Annual Review of Sociology, 13, 443–64.

3 Leadership, Learning and Negotiation in a Social Psychology of Organizing IAN E. MORLEY AND DIAN-MARIE HOSKING

INTRODUCTION The purpose of this chapter is to introduce some key themes in a social psychology of organizing, and to show how they relate to recent research linking talk about leadership to talk about communities of practice. Our general approach is one form of social constructionism and attempts to show how a social psychology of organizing is social because it shows that talk about people and talk about contexts cannot be separated. We take the view that this is because the relationship between people and contexts is one of mutual creation: so, people create contexts and contexts create people. Furthermore, we suppose that both contexts and persons are created, maintained and changed in practice (praxis), particularly in conversation, and that most of the relevant conversations are best described as a form of negotiation. Leaders enter into this ‘mutual construction’ process because they have been assigned and/or earned the responsibility to encourage certain kinds of conversations – those that contribute to the construction and maintenance of ‘cultures of productivity’ (to borrow a term from Akin and Hopelain, 1986). More generally, we define (analytically) leadership acts as those that make a special contribution to the continuing (re)construction of such ‘cultures’. These views are part of our response to both ‘new leadership’ research (House and Singh, 1987) and what preceded it. To see why such a response is needed it is sufficient to reflect on the large number of commentaries that say, despite years of research on leadership, little progress has been made, and the main research programmes are ‘degenerating’ (in Lakatos’s [1978] sense). This is not the place for us to draw out a detailed critique of the history of leadership research, although we have entered into aspects of this debate elsewhere (e.g. Hosking and Morley, 1988; 1991). Let us say, despite the risk of oversimplification, that too much research on leadership has sought to identify those characteristics that leaders bring as inputs to situations and thereby allow them to influence the output of ‘followers’ (see Hosking and Morley, 1991, ch. 9). The inputs were conceived 43

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as personality traits (such as dominance) or as interaction styles (such as Initiating Structure and Consideration), and much effort was devoted to finding the ideal profile. When it became clear that there was no such ideal profile, heroic attempts were made to find contingency models, saying what kind of profile was needed in what kinds of circumstances. The best known attempts have been those of Fiedler (1967) and Hersey and Blanchard (1969). Despite some robust defences (e.g. Fiedler and House, 1988) this sort of research and theory can be said to rely on increasingly ad hoc defences against three main sorts of criticism: 1) If there is an ideal style (e.g. high Initiating Structure and high Consideration), it is one that most people cannot sustain, so identifying such a style has little practical value (Morley and Hosking, 1985). 2) There does not seem to be any such ideal style. Leadership style conceived in this way does not seem to be a key input with respect to high performing groups (e.g. Vaill, 1982). 3) And, perhaps most importantly, there is something fundamentally misguided about this whole approach (e.g. Hosking and Morley, 1991). We shall try to say, briefly, what we think is most misguided from our own personal points of view (and let us admit freely that some of our views will be controversial). What we shall try to do, explicitly, in a more general critique, is to draw out some of the themes that we have emphasized and that others have not. That is to say, if we have had a distinctive part in any debate about ‘new leadership’ it has been because, first, we have a general view about the nature of a social psychology of organizing (e.g. Hosking and Morley, 1991; Morley, 1992) and that, second, we have applied this general view to the study of leadership in particular (e.g. Hosking, 1997; 2001). A SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY OF ORGANIZING Let us then consider further the view that there is something misguided about the whole of the ‘traditional’ approach to leadership. Our most radical criticism would be that traditional research is misguided because it uses inappropriate models of persons, processes and contexts, and of the relationships between them. Another way of putting this is to say that traditional theories entirely fail to appreciate the necessity for people to: ●

●

make sense of people and things, tasks and events, by placing them in the framework of existing reality constructions, and to use those frameworks to construct appropriate action, meaning action that may be justified in terms of the norms of appropriate reference groups; recognize that the most important features of contexts are social relations in which other people voice multiple value-ations including commitments to particular reality constructions;

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● ●

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engage in disputation and initiate changes acceptable to other members of appropriate reference groups; In these ways participants may contribute to the ongoing construction of ‘cultures of productivity’.

Let us begin by considering each of these points in more detail. 1

Interpreting events

Research on leadership has had little to say about those cognitive processes whereby people make sense of issues, amplify their interpretations, and mobilize them in the ongoing construction1 of intelligent social action.2 In contrast, the image promoted by cognitive psychology has been that the human mind is a device that is: ‘exquisitely tailored to make sense of the world. Give it the slightest clue and off it goes, providing explanation, rationalisation, understanding’ (Norman, 1988, p. 2; also see Hosking and Morley, 1991, p. 20). However, it is important that this image is supplemented by, or possibly subordinated to, one in which interpretation depends on a ‘persistent framework of institutions and customs’ (Bartlett, 1932, p. 255). At that time Bartlett was concerned with the constructive nature of memory. Later, he began to explore the connections between memory and thinking. If memory was constructive, so was thinking, and his research led him to the conclusion that each kind of thinking was ‘an extension of evidence, in line with evidence and in such a manner as to fill up gaps in the evidence’ (Bartlett, 1958, p. 20). What Bartlett added to his earlier work was a much greater appreciation of the constraints placed by social interactions (conversations) and social conventions (norms) on what counted as evidence, on what counted as legitimate inference and on what counted as filling gaps in the evidence. This is part of what we had in mind when we said that contexts and persons are created, maintained and changed in conversations. With hindsight we may distinguish two aspects to Bartlett’s work, and they are both important. Bartlett’s first insight was that cognitive processes function to extend evidence, in line with evidence, and to fill gaps in evidence, so that what is said is acceptable to an ordinary member of a reference group. In a similar spirit Hosking and Morley (1991, p. 26) suggested that our: evaluative beliefs are much more affected by the context in which they are to be expressed than we would ordinarily suppose. Thus, making sense of the world is social rather than solitary. What we learn, and how we express that learning, is very much affected by those we meet, where we meet them, and by our relationships with them.

Another way of putting this is to say that different kinds of conversations or narratives work to instantiate different kinds of ‘cognitive tuning’,3 so that what we say, and how we say it, is tuned to the demands of ‘projects’ or ‘lifetasks’ as they unfold in our dealings with different people. Lave and Wenger’s

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(1991) talk of ‘situated learning’ as participation in ‘communities of practice’ expresses closely related lines of argument. Bartlett’s second insight was that different kinds of thinking are guided by different kinds of conversation and by different norms, but that they are all ‘fundamentally cooperative, social, and [cannot] proceed far without the stimulus of outside contacts’ (Bartlett, 1958, p. 123).4 He was not the first person to make this kind of point, but his own work, and that of others, notably Asch (1952), influenced subsequent writers to take seriously the message that minds are social rather than individual because they are based on the discursive practices of particular social groups (Billig, 1989; Brown and Duguid, 1991; Harré, 1979; Harré and Gillett, 1994; Hosking and Morley, 1991; Lave and Wenger, 1991; Orr, 1990, Valsinger and van der Veer, 2000). We have tried to combine these two insights by saying that people may sometimes engage in very limited kinds of conversation, and therefore become too confident that they understand the world and what they are able to do in it. However, many tasks require ‘actively open-minded thinking’ (Baron, 1988), ‘vigilant information processing’ (Janis and Mann, 1977), or ‘rational analysis for a problematic world’5 (Rosenhead, 1989). Behind these different terminologies is a recognition that intelligent social action consists in following rules of good thinking, that good thinking should be free from bias and that ‘ambiguities and differences between observers’ should be considered as ‘essential aspects in the evaluative task’ (Linstone, 1984, p. 36). Leaders have a primary responsibility for ensuring that such conversations take place.6 They do so because relational processes feature multiple reality constructions and shifting influence. Skilful leadership processes promote systematic methods that, in turn, promote actively open-minded thinking and a ‘culture of productivity’ (Akin and Hopelain, 1986). 2

Contexts are social because they are relational settings

The most important aspects of contexts are other people and their narratives or local-cultural constructions. This said, one might expect research on leadership to be integrated into the social psychology of groups. However, when this has happened, research on leadership has been integrated into a (North American) paradigm of experimental social psychology that has tended to ignore differences in valuations and influence, to the extent that most researchers would be perfectly willing to define groups in terms of people who share certain values. This is defensible neither in theory nor in practice (e.g. Sarason, 1972). We have stressed that the potential for conflicts of value (or valuation7) is inherent in the ongoing (re-)creation of social settings. If groups share values about ends and about means that is a collective achievement, it is not something constitutive of groups. Further it is an achievement constructed through power relations. In other words, politics is essential to an understanding of the activities of

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organizing – or the creation of settings. A group, relations between groups or, more generally ‘organizing’, is constructed in conversations – in multiple narratives that voice different knowledge claims and commitments – in the activities of people engaged in different projects or life-tasks. We think that it is important to think of social contexts as ‘relational settings’ in the sense we have outlined (Hosking and Bass, 2001; Hosking and Morley, 1991). We suggest that there are two main consequences of this. The first is the operation of the principle of ‘cognitive tuning’ identified above. The second is that we may think of organizing as a series of projects (perhaps life tasks) and related identities, linked in various ways. Typically, to carry out such projects we need help from other people, either to complete the projects to standard, or to complete them at all. We have argued that project work of this kind proceeds through a series of negotiations, most explicitly in Morley and Hosking (1985) and Hosking and Morley (1988; 1991). Again, related lines of theorizing can be found using the language of ‘communities of practice’ although, in our view, the politics of relations within and between communities has been relatively neglected.8 3

Disputation, negotiation and change

Hosking and Morley (1991) set out four theses: 1) Negotiation begins when someone acts to change the status quo – including narrating the possibility of change. 2) Continuing negotiations will involve simplification and partiality. 3) The process of negotiation may be divided into stages of decision-making. 4) Each stage poses cognitive and political problems. The first thesis is simply an attempt to find some non-arbitrary way of saying when negotiation in relation to some project begins, so that analysis is possible. The second thesis has three main aspects: namely, that people have limited capacity to process information, that social actions are inherently ambiguous and have to be made sense of, and that constructions (narratives) are partisan – meaning that they are made from particular points of view; and passed on to others in summary form (Dunsire, 1978; Hosking and Morley, 1991; Morley and Ormerod, 1996). The third thesis treats negotiations as historical narratives to be decomposed into open-ended stages. The historical element comes in because when people negotiate contracts their major concern is one of accounting. They have to find a rationale, convincing to some referent person[s] or group[s], making sense of what is happening now, in relation to what has happened in the past and to what is likely to happen in the future (Hosking and Morley, 1991; Morley, 1992). The stage element came from the decision-making sequence identified by Snyder and Diesing (1977) in their study of Conflict Among Nations. However, there is nothing sacrosanct about their stages.

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Others have chosen different descriptions to suit particular purposes (e.g. Friend, 1989). However, whatever descriptions are chosen it seems to us that particular narratives are chosen in relation to particular projects and, once agreed, constrain commitments to particular policies (or lines of action). Our final thesis is thus that each stage of this ‘structure in process’ involves cognitive and political aspects (strictly, cognitive-social on the one hand, and social-political on the other). The cognitive aspects arise because people have to organize their intellectual activity and think clearly about the issues. The political aspects arise because people dispute what count as issues, what count as a sensible lines of development, what count as effective policies and what count as realistic attempts to implement those policies (Hosking and Morley, 1991, p. 7). Both cognitive and political processes are central to leadership when viewed as a certain sort of relational process – as we will shortly outline. One of the main jobs of a social psychology of organizing is to show how to appreciate the cognitive and political processes through which people create and support various kinds of setting – variously called cultures, rhetorical contexts, formative contexts or ‘communities of practice’. Some say that the process of organizing creates orders of value in which different people have different commitments to particular descriptions and to particular actions in particular contexts. Broadly speaking, political actions arise when people think differently and want to act differently. The possibilities for thinking differently arise because social actions are inherently ambiguous, are described from particular points of view and cannot be completely described (Dunsire, 1978; Hosking and Morley, 1991; Morley and Ormerod, 1996). But, once they are described different descriptions differently constrain how the process will ‘go on’. (Conversely, once a person is committed to a particular policy, that commitment will mean that certain descriptions are likely to be applied to that policy rather than others.) As we have said, we think it important to show how to appreciate these cognitive-social-political processes and, in particular, important seriously to explore negotiation as part of the story, joining this line of talk with talk about how such processes may be performed more or less skilfully. In our view, any talk of ‘communities of practice’ should not overestimate communality, agreement and talk of ‘what is’ at the expense of multiplicity, disagreement, and what might be. This includes disputation over what counts as knowledge, what counts as maintenance of the community, what counts as change, and what to commit to – if only for a while. All of this implies that, broadly speaking, organizing is about commitments and how those commitments are created, mobilized, maintained and changed. Because of the distinction between two kinds of commitments – to descriptions and to lines of action – approaches of this kind are often called languageaction perspectives (see Fikes, 1982; Hosking and Morley, 1991; Morley and Ormerod, 1996; Winograd and Flores, 1986). We believe that some sort of language-action perspective may be used to summarize much of what we have

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to say about a social psychology of organizing and about the role of leadership in those processes. 4

Constructing cultures of productivity

We shall argue that skilful leadership processes promote a ‘culture of productivity’. This is defined by relationships in which participants experience the emerging processes as legible, coherent and open-ended. Participants feel the processes to be ‘legible’ when equivocality is reduced in recognizable and agreeable ways. Processes are ‘coherent’ when participants experience an integrated structure throughout the process, and processes are ‘open-ended’ inasmuch as relationships are flexible, i.e., they can create and accommodate change (see Hosking and Morley, 1991). This sort of structure in process supports learning as, for example, argued by Lave and Wenger in their talk of situated learning and ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ (Lave and Wenger, 1991). We have chosen to emphasize leadership and skilful processes. This is rather different from, for example, ‘fixing’ particular participants as masters or apprentices and different from fixing and putting out of question what counts as skilful performance. We suggest that participants are likely to differ in the extent to which they see themselves and others to consistently influence the legibility, coherence and openness of their culture. Further, participants are likely to see each other as achieving influence in different ways – ways that are more or less acceptable in that culture or community. Finally, some – or indeed all9 – participants may come to be perceived as making contributions that consistently achieve acceptable influence, and come to be expected to do so. Contributions of this kind we refer to as leadership; those who make such contributions we call leaders (Hosking and Morley, 1991). LEADERSHIP IN A SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY OF ORGANIZING Within this general framework we can identify four major lines of development with respect to theory and research on leadership. We have made serious attempts to link talk about leadership processes to talk about: ● ● ● ●

cognitive and political skills; disputation and change (by treating the skills of leadership as cognate with the skills of negotiation); task-analysis, and the cognitive and political dilemmas in those tasks; social constructionism, organizational learning and the management of organizational learning.

In each case a central part of the point of the enterprise has been to give due emphasis to intelligent social action and to leaders as exercising particular responsibility for its promotion. We shall consider each of these lines of

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research in turn, although, as we shall see, and as we might expect, they are heavily interdependent. 1

The cognitive and political skills of leadership

We have advocated the view that skilful leadership serves to promote social orders in which certain kinds of change are seen collectively to make sense. In other words, we suppose that leadership plays a central part in promoting processes whereby disputation converges onto positions that everyone can live with10 – because everyone can see that the process is transparent, and because everyone can see that the process makes sense.11 There has been considerable controversy about the meanings of each of these phrases, and we think it is important to consider some of them in more detail. So, when we say that leaders play a central part in promoting certain processes, we do not mean that all leadership is, in the current jargon, ‘transformational’. We have more in common with those who suggest that leadership can be viewed as the ‘management of meaning’ (e.g. Smircich and Morgan, 1992), and that leaders have a central responsibility to organize this process. However, this can mean a number of things. In our view it does not mean that leaders must impose their visions on others or that they must be more skilful or more successful than their followers. Certainly, leaders may sometimes have to provide ‘pictures’ or ‘frames’ or ‘visions’ or ‘principles’ or ‘scripts’ for other people to follow, and people may sometimes rely on them to do so,12 but it would be a gross mistake to think that they are the only people able to do these jobs (Hosking, 1997). If we have made any contributions to this literature they have tried to show, first, that leaders and followers are much more interchangeable than has been supposed, that leaders engage in trial arguments with themselves and others, and that one of the ways of examining what kind of context (discursive, formative, rhetorical) is involved is to investigate what kinds of input are appreciated, regardless of source (Hosking and Morley, 1988; 1991). Such investigations tell us whether leadership is principled or just self-serving. Those who have concentrated on visionary aspects of leadership have also tended to forget that leaders cannot simply direct the actions of their ‘followers’. Influence has to be acceptable. Part of what this can mean is that ‘power over’ may not be locally valued as a way of ‘creating settings’. In addition, and as we have argued elsewhere (Hosking and Morley, 1991, p. 249): ‘To build cultures of productivity, it is essential that differences are articulated through a process of actively open-minded thinking. To build such cultures, ways must be found to respect differences which must be preserved.’ We hope that this is part of what people have in mind when they repeat the ‘mantra’ that ‘leaders lead groups’. This is one reason why we have given such prominence to negotiation. It is in these respects that leaders are just like negotiators. If decisions are to ‘stick’ they will have to be acceptable to those they represent.

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One implication of this is that leaders, considered as negotiators, face two kinds of problem. The first is how to describe change, or the possibility of change, and how to reach a working consensus over the description of this change. The second is how to forge commitments based on these descriptions and to show that they make sense. 2

Leadership and the skills of negotiation

Those psychologists who have talked about the skills of negotiation have emphasized the two aspects we have already identified. That is, they have divided skills into intellectual tasks (posing cognitive problems) and influence tasks (posing political problems). As noted earlier, we have tried to stress the social-relational aspects of these ‘tasks’. We have linked talk about leadership both to limitations in cognitive capacity (constrained by the nature of our neural architecture) and to dispositions to engage in rational thinking. In the first case, we have urged that skilled negotiators help others to match their cognitive capacities to the demands of the tasks they face (along the lines outlined by Welford, 1980), mostly by keeping their messages simple and by slowing things down.13 In the second case, we have argued that leaders need to promote cultures dominated by what Baron (1988) has called actively open-minded thinking (Hosking and Morley, 1991). This means that leadership processes need to be principled in the sense that they encourage ‘search that is thorough in proportion to the importance of the question’ and ‘fairness to other possibilities than the one we initially favour’ (Baron, 1988, p. 30). Others, such as Janis have called the process one of vigilant information processing (Janis, 1989; Janis and Mann, 1977). We, like others, have urged that cognitive and political problems are very much interrelated. However, let us concentrate on political processes for the moment. Here, we have suggested that what leaders do is make particularly influential contributions to a process of change in which all participants negotiate and renegotiate the terms on which they will ‘do business’. In such cases the point of the exercise is to establish what changes are possible, and at what cost. The outcome of the deliberations is a set of rules (narratives) defining the terms on which the parties will do business in the future. That is to say, leaders take a major role in a process by which they – and their ‘followers’ – ‘rewrite social history’. To explain the metaphor we need to explain the written history and the social history. The written history comes from formalized rules and relations such as those characteristic of organization structure. One way to put this is to say that negotiations are conducted in the context of existing rules, and that the effect of negotiation is to change those rules. The social history comes from the fact that changes have to be explained to other people, accepted by them and implemented by them. This is why the most important outcome of negotiation is an agreed narrative about what has happened, and why, providing a rationale linking what is happening now to what has happened in the

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past and to what will happen in the future. If such narratives are not acceptable they will not stick. 3

Task-analysis, decision-making and dilemmas

Historically, it is quite remarkable how studies of leadership have tried to avoid any serious analysis of the nature of leadership tasks. But it is impossible to talk about skill, or strategy or tactics, without talking about goals, valuations, bias and other cognate concepts. Such talk ought to follow from the detailed analyses of particular tasks, even if made from particular points of view. There has been little such analysis, and we think that this is one main reason why research on leadership has said little about skill, or strategy or tactics or about intelligent social action, and it is one main reason why leadership research has been denigrated in terms of its practical value (Hosking and Morley, 1988; 1991; Hunt et al., 1984). Fortunately, some recent research has attempted to fill this void and, without attempting to be comprehensive, we shall select some prominent examples: ●

●

● ●

●

●

Those working within the domain of planning and decision-making within public policy domains have attempted systematically to analyse what it would mean to carry out a rational analysis of alternative policies within those domains (Friend, 1989; Friend and Hickling, 1987; Friend and Jessop, 1977; Levin, 1976). Much of this research has been conducted within the framework of attempts to rethink the nature and effectiveness of operational research (Morley and Ormerod, 1996; Rosenhead, 1999). Some have attempted to link talk about planning, talk about decisionmaking, and talk about negotiation to talk about design (Clausing and Andrade, 1996; Hosking and Morley, 1991). Some have attempted explicitly to analyse the skills of negotiation in industrial or international or legal or other contexts (Morley, 1992). Others have tried to identify difficulties in managing relationships that may apply wherever there are questions of organizational trust within or between groups (Hosking and Morley, 1988; 1991; Kotter, 1982; Morley, 1992). Some have tried to explore what leadership might mean when localcultural valuations support inclusive relations of equals and distributed leadership (e.g., Brown and Hosking, 1986; Hosking, 2001). Others still, have tried to explore problems of cognitive tuning, such as how to influence people without offending them, or how to make public politically sensitive information without provoking damaging responses (te Molder, 1999).

In each case the researchers have tried to identify dilemmas that have application beyond the immediate context of significance. Thus, Friend and his associates have set out an approach to planning under pressure in which

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dilemmas are linked to various kinds of uncertainty faced by decision-makers. In this framework, dilemmas about the nature, timing and scope of cognitive and political problems come to the fore, as they apply to the core processes of shaping, designing, comparing and choosing.14 Pugh and Morley have outlined a stage-based approach to design (called ‘Total Design’) in which they identify dilemmas of commitment within each stage (so that making decisions too soon may be based on an incomplete analysis of intellectual problems, but that delaying decisions too long may be based on an incomplete analysis of political problems). Researchers who have analysed difficulties in managing relationships, have focused on those that implicate the role of the leader (e.g. dilemmas about democracy) and those concerned with the nature of organizational trust within and between groups (e.g. dilemmas about confidentiality). Finally, te Molder (1999) has attempted to explore the nature of various dilemmas posed by defensive reactions to the communication process. We think that all of this adds up to a view that asserts that: ‘the way in which such dilemmas are handled, when working under real-time pressures, can have deep influences not only on the decisions reached, but also on the way the decision process is steered through a labyrinth of possible organizational channels’ (Friend, 1989, p. 123). Groups that fail to negotiate an acceptable path through such dilemmas are not likely to be effective in the long run. Leadership that fails to understand the relationships between the different kinds of dilemma is likely to fail. 4

Social constructionism and organizational learning

Less than 50 years ago psychology was dominated by the psychology of learning. Yet in Bechtel and Graham’s (1998) A Companion to Cognitive Science the only chapter that includes ‘learning’ in its title is a chapter on ‘Machine learning’. Part of this shift has been an attempt to provide an integrated view of cognition in which talk about learning is integrated with talk about memory, perception, problem-solving, reasoning and understanding, and other cognate concepts (as in Anderson, 1990). Another part of this shift has been an attempt to link talk about learning to technical issues in mathematics, computer science, and philosophy (as in Glymour, 1999). The former has been welcomed and the latter has not. One result has been that talk about learning has been more obviously geared to work in international relations (e.g. Jervis, 1970; 1976) and to organizations (‘learning organizations’ and ‘organizational learning’) (e.g. Cohen and Sproull, 1996; Hosking and Bouwen, 2000) than it has been before. For our part, we would wish to welcome some developments in both fields. It is both convenient and, we think, important, to consider some of the main issues that have emerged about learning in relation to ‘constructionism’ and ‘social constructionism’. The former embraces all those who, like Piaget, Bruner and others, have emphasized the active role that the mind plays in

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going beyond the information given – so that learning is a process by which knowledge is constructed. Much of the discussion remains dominated by Piagetian theory, but all modern cognitive psychologists are constructionists in this sense. Despite this, few of them pay sufficient attention to those social processes that subject constructive processes to normative constraints. This brings us to social constructionism. One variant could be broadly described as expanding constructionism by giving much more prominence to both local and global principles of cognitive tuning. The former come from conversations, whether formal or informal, and the latter from institutional formulations of knowledge and epistemologies (McCormick and Paechter, 1999). Our own work is both constructionist and social constructionist – in the sense outlined.15 In terms of constructionism, we have emphasized that expertise within a given domain requires knowledge within that domain, and that much of that knowledge is tacit. It is not taught explicitly but learned, like craft knowledge, with experience of particular contexts or relational settings. In this respect our own framework is close to those that are usually described as neo-Piagetian (Demetriou, Shayer and Efklides, 1992). However, we have also taken the view that domain-specific learning requires systematic guidance in the form of ‘scaffolding’, and in this respect our position is closer to that of Vygotsky (see Wood, 1988). Connections can also be seen between our work and the more analytical and critical variants of the ‘communities of practice’ literature (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Orr, 1990). However, we have paid more attention than most to those systematic methods that attempt legibly and coherently to produce ‘structure in process’, particularly in the context of engineering product design, and in the context of operational research. Putting this together, let us say that the relationship between tacit and explicit knowledge is controversial,16 but that we have emphasized the importance of explicit knowledge more than others. If we were to extend our previous treatments we would agree with Glaser’s (1999) statements that ‘the value of practice can be increased, if we see it as something to be carefully designed’ (ibid., p. 97) so that: ‘teaching practice can make apparent the forms of students’ thinking, in ways that can be observed, transmitted, discussed, reflected on, and moved toward more competent performance and dispositions for reasoning’ (Glaser, 1999, pp. 99–100). Educational leaders, because they are leaders, have a primary responsibility to facilitate such practices. We hope we have said enough to be clear that this does not mean that such leaders have to be more expert than others. However, they have to be sufficiently knowledgeable to be able to co-ordinate and to encourage ‘face to face confrontation and discussion of differences’ (Hosking and Bass, 2001, p. 355). They have to be able to organize processes whereby such discussion is constructive rather than destructive, so that there is convergence on policies that all can understand and live with (Clausing and Andrade, 1996; Hosking and Morley, 1991).

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CONCLUSIONS We have put forward a position on leadership that is both constructionist and social constructionist.17 The constructionist elements come from consideration of the architecture of the mind and from a consideration of those active processes by which minds create reality. The social elements come from consideration of those principles by which our cognitions are ‘tuned’ because of interpersonal and institutional constraints. Psychologists have tended to promote the former at the expense of the latter. Sociologists have tended to promote the latter at the expense of the former. Some social psychologists, such as us, have tried to find an appropriate balance between the two. For these and other reasons, we have tried to produce a social psychology that is informed by cognitive psychology (so that we are not criticizing ‘straw’ people) but remains genuinely social (so that is not just cognitive psychology with some social ‘factors’ added). The net effect of all of this is that leaders should participate in relational processes in ways that: ● ● ● ●

link their own knowledge and experience intelligently to that of others; (help to) organize negotiations within (‘internal’) and between (‘external’) groups; deal with cognitive and political aspects of the core problems in their (individual and collective) decision-making tasks; focus on key dilemmas in their individual and collective tasks.

This line of argument could be said to upgrade the role of ‘followers’ and to downgrade that of ‘leaders’. Leaders do have special responsibilities, but one is not to ignore the talents of their followers. NOTES 1. We have deliberately used interchangeably the tools of ‘interpretation’, ‘sense making’, and ‘construction’. In the present context, these language tools are to be understood, not as references to individual acts, but in relation to our argument that talk about people and talk about contexts cannot be separated. 2. Here we mean to talk of language as both one form of action, and as a tool for talking about and reflecting on action. 3. The term ‘cognitive tuning’ is taken from Cohen (1961). 4. The particular quotation refers to Bartlett’s views about scientific thinking, but we think that he would have been quite happy to generalize these remarks to other kinds of thinking (see Bartlett, 1958). 5. Which here means a socially constructed world or worlds. 6. Perhaps it is worth asking, at this point, when do people stop thinking? When do they think a problem has been solved? The halting problem has been an important one for computer science, and perhaps there is an equally important halting problem in psychology. The answer may be slightly more complicated, but it is nonetheless revealing. If Hosking and Morley (1991) are correct, the ‘stop rule’ is that people will stop

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thinking when they have done enough ‘to minimize doubts that the policies they have chosen will be certified by competent members of their reference groups. In some rhetorical contexts this may increase the likelihood of biased information processing … In other rhetorical contexts it may have the opposite effect, producing an increased commitment to interpretive practices based on systematic methods [that] promote actively-open-minded thinking’ (Hosking and Morley, 1991, p. 102). 7. The language of ‘value’ has often been used in the context of a wider thought style that separates ‘fact’ and ‘value’ and treats the latter as an ‘input from individual’ (see our earlier discussion) that ‘messes up’ rational thinking. We use the term ‘valuation’ in the context of our social constructionist perspective – emphasizing that social constructions of reality necessarily imply some ordering of value. 8. The issue of power was given more attention in the early literatures on communities of practice but has been relatively neglected in later, more prescriptive and managerialist developments of the concept. The ‘critical’, analytical emphasis of Lave and Wenger (1991) has been marginalized by treatments that for example, take for granted a unitary and uncontested conception of hierarchy, what counts as ‘mastery’, who is expert and who novice, and the institutionalized conventions that help to legitimize and stabilize such realities and relations. 9. Although in our experience this is both rare and difficult to do – even when participants are explicitly trying to construct such ways of going on in relation as, for example, in some social movement groups (see, e.g., Brown and Hosking, 1986). 10. Chester Barnard provided the useful concept of ‘latitude of acceptance’ to indicate that one does not have to accept in the sense of agree but only find for example, some decision acceptable in the sense of falling within one’s latitude of acceptance. 11. This point has been elaborated by Morley in the context of engineering product design (Pugh and Morley) and by Hosking in the context of organizational development (Hosking, 2002; Hosking and Bass, 2001). 12. And they may acquire power by doing so. 13. This sort of message is quite general. Some of the skills of negotiation are the skills of socially competent actors. It is not only negotiators who sometimes have to slow things down, and repeat what they have said, so that those in their audience are able to take in what they have to say: so do teachers. 14. In our terminology, the core processes are identification (of issues), development (of possible lines of action), choice (between options) and implementation (of policies). We think that the similarities between the terminologies are much more important than the differences. 15. Another variant, referred to by Steier (1991) as ‘second order constructionism’, gives serious attention to what follows from recognizing ‘observers’ (theoristresearchers) to be part of (rather than apart from) the social processes they study. This shifts the focus away from epistemology, collapses the distinction between ontology and epistemology, opens up new possibilities for research, and gives ethics a new prominence (see also Hosking, 2000). 16. Indeed, from one point of view the distinction is very problematic – explicit knowledge is just the visible ‘tip of the iceberg’ – reliant on tacit knowledge (we cannot say everything we know); see, for example, Dachler and Hosking (1995). 17. As we have remarked elsewhere, there are many social constructionisms. The version we have outlined here is but one. Elsewhere, Hosking has explored a version of social constructionism that ‘starts’ with construction processes and stays with talk of processes rather than persons – not least because talk of persons is so often misunderstood

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as necessarily individualistic! In addition, she has sought to develop a critical variant of social constructionism which (reflexively) includes the ‘scientist’/narrator in her own narrative (see, for example, Hosking, 2000).

REFERENCES Akin, G. and Hopelain, D. (1986) Finding the culture of productivity, Organizational Dynamics, 14, 19–32. Asch, S.E. (1952) Social Psychology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Baron, J. (1985) Rationality and Intelligence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baron, J. (1988) Thinking and Deciding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bartlett, F.C. (1932) Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bartlett, F.C. (1958) Thinking: An Experimental and Social Study. London: Unwin University Books. Bechtel, W. and Graham. G. (eds) (1998) A Companion to Cognitive Science. Oxford: Blackwell. Billig, M. (1989) Arguing and Thinking: A Rhetorical Approach to Social Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, H. and Hosking, D.M. (1986) Distributed leadership and skilled performance as successful organizing in social movements, Human Relations, 39, 65–79. Brown J.S. and Duguid, P. (1991) Organizational learning and communities of practice: toward a unified view of working, learning, and innovation, Organization Science, 2(1), 40–57. Clausing, D. and Andrade, R. (eds) (1996) Creating Innovative Products Using Total Design: The Living Legacy of Stuart Pugh. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Cohen, A. (1961) Cognitive tuning as a factor affecting impression formation, Journal of Personality, 29, 235–45. Cohen, M.D. and Sproull, L.S. (eds) (1996) Organizational Learning. Thousand Oaks, CA, London and New Delhi: Sage. Dachler, H.P. and Hosking, D.M (1995) The primacy of relations in the social construction of organizational realities, in D.M. Hosking, H.P. Dachler and K. Gergen (eds), Management and Organization: Relational Alternatives to Individualism. Aldershot: Avebury. Demetriou, A., Shayer, M. and Efklides, A. (1992) Neo-Piagetian Theories of Cognitive Development: Implications and Applications for Education. London: Routledge. Dunsire, A. (1978) The Execution Process Volume 1: Implementation in a Bureaucracy. London: Martin Robertson. Fiedler, F.E. (1967) A Theory of Leadership Effectiveness. New York: McGraw-Hill. Fiedler, F.E. and House, R.J. (1988) Leadership theory and research: a report of progress, in C.L. Cooper and I. Robertson (eds), International Review of Industrial and Organizational Psychology. Chichester: Wiley. Fikes, R.E. (1982) A commitment-based framework for describing informal cooperative work, Cognitive Science, 6, 331–47. Friend, J. (1989) The strategic choice approach, in J. Rosenhead (ed.), Rational Analysis for a Problematic World: Problem Structuring Methods for Complexity, Uncertainty, and Conflict. Chichester: Wiley. Friend. J. and Hickling, A. (1987) Planning Under Pressure: The Strategic Choice Approach. Oxford: Pergamon.

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Friend, J. and Jessop, W.N. (1977) Local Government and Strategic Choice (2nd edn). Oxford: Pergamon. Glaser, R. (1999) Expert knowledge and processes of thinking, in R. McCormick and C. Paechter (eds), Learning and Knowledge. London: Paul Chapman Publishing, published in association with the Open University. Glymour, C. (1999) The hierarchies of knowledge and the mathematics of discovery, in P. Millican and A. Clark (eds), Machines and Thought: The Legacy of Alan Turing, Volume 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harré, R. (1979) Social Being: A Theory for Social Psychology. Oxford: Blackwell. Harré, R. and Gillett, G. (1994) The Discursive Mind. Thousand Oaks, CA, London and New Delhi: Sage. Hersey, P. and Blanchard, K.H. (1969) Life-cycle theory of leadership, Training and Development Journal, 23(5), 26–34. Hosking, D.M. (1997) Organising, leadership, and skilful process, in Grint, K. (ed.), Leadership: Classical, Contemporary and Critical Approaches, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hosking, D.M. (2001) Social construction as process: some new possibilities for research and development, Concepts and Transformation, 4(2), 117–32. Hosking, D.M. Leadership processes and leadership development: Reflections from a social constructionist paradigm. http://www.geocities.com/dian_marie_hosking/ ldrship.html Hosking, D.M. (2000) Ecology in mind: mindful practices, European Journal of Work and Organisational Psychology, 9(2), 147–58. Hosking, D.M. (2002) Constructing changes: A social constructionist approach to changework (and beetles and witches). Tilburg: Tilburg University. Hosking, D.M. and Bass, A. (2001) Constructing changes in relational processes: introducing a social constructionist approach to change work, Career Development International, 6(7), 348–60. Hosking, D.M. and Bouwen, R. (2000) Guest editors of special issue on: Organizational learning: relational constructionist approaches. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 9(2), 129–303. Hosking, D.M. and Morley, I.E. (1988) The skills of leadership, in G. Hunt, B.R. Baliga, H.P. Dachler and C.A. Schriesheim (eds), Emerging Leadership Vistas. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books. Hosking, D.M. and Morley, I.E. (1991) A Social Psychology of Organizing: People, Processes and Contexts. New York: Prentice-Hall. House, R.J. and Singh, J. (1987) Organizational behaviour: Some new directions fo I/O Psychology. Annual Review of Psychology, 38, 669–718. Hunt, J.G., Hosking, D.M., Schriescheim, C.A. and Stewart, R. (1984) Leadership and Managers: International Perspectives on Managerial Behavior and Leadership. Elmsford, NY: Pergamon. Janis, I.L. (1989) Crucial Decisions: Leadership in Policymaking and Crisis Management. New York: Free Press. Janis, I.L. and Mann, L. (1977) Decision-Making: A Psychological Analysis of Conflict, Choice and Commitment. New York: Free Press. Jervis, R. (1970) The Logic of Images in International Relations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Jervis, R. (1976) Perception and Misperception in International Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kotter, J.P. (1982) The General Managers. New York: Free Press. Lakatos, I. (1978) The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes: Philosophical Papers Volume 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991) Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levin, P.H. (1976) Government and the Planning Process. London: Allen & Unwin. Linstone, H.A. (1984) in H.A. Linstone, A.J. Meltsner, M. Adelson, B. Clary, P.G. Cook, S. Hawke, R.-E. Miller, A. Mysior, J.S. Pearson Jr, J. Schuman, L. Umbenstock, D. Wagner and S.J. Will, Multiple Perspectives for Decision-Making: Bridging the Gap Between Analysis and Action. New York: North-Holland. McCormick, R. and Paechter, C. (1999) Learning and Knowledge. London: Paul Chapman Publishing in association with The Open University. Morley, I.E. (1992) Intra-organizational bargaining, in J. Hartley and G.M. Stephenson (eds), Employment Relations. Oxford: Blackwell. Morley, I.E. and Hosking, D.M. (1985) Relationships between Consideration and Initiating Structure: two causal relationships rather than one?, Current Psychological Research and Reviews, 4(2), 119–32. Morley, I.E. and Ormerod, R. (1996) A language-action approach to operational research, Journal of the Operational Research Society, 47, 731–40. Norman, D.A. (1988) The Psychology of Everyday Things. New York: Basic Books. Orr, J.E. (1990) Sharing knowledge, celebrating identity: community memory in a service culture, in D. Middleton and D. Edwards (eds), Collective Remembering. London: Sage. Rosenhead, J. (ed.) (1989) Rational Analysis for a Problematic World: Problem Structuring Methods for Complexity, Uncertainty, and Conflict. Chichester: Wiley. Sarason, S.B. (1972) The Creation of Social Settings and the Future Societies. San-Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Smircich, L. and Morgan, G. (1992) Leadership: the management of meaning, Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 18, 257–73. Snyder, G.H. and Diesing, P. (1977) Conflict Among Nations: Bargaining, DecisionMaking and System Structure in International Crises. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Steier, F. (1991) Research and Reflexivity. London: Sage. te Molder, H.F.M. (1999) Discourse of dilemmas: An analysis of communication planners’ accounts, British Journal of Social Psychology, 38, 245–63. Vaill, P. (1982) The purposing of high performance systems, Organizational Dynamics, Autumn, 23–39. Valsinger, J. and van der Veer, R. (2000) The Social Mind: Construction of the Idea. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Welford, A.T. (1980) The concept of social skill and its application to social performance, in W.T. Singleton, P. Spurgeon and R. Stammmers (eds), The Analysis of Social Skill. London: Plenum Press. Winograd, T. and Flores, F. (1986) Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Wood, D. (1988) How Children Think and Learn. Oxford: Blackwell.

4 Distributing and Intensifying School Leadership1 PETER GRONN

Early in the new millennium, an informed understanding of the leadership of schools requires an appreciation of two interrelated phenomena: the distributed pattern of leaders’ work and the intensification of work practices. The purpose of this chapter is to discuss each of these features and the ways in which they are reconstituting school leadership. I begin with a review of leadership and then suggest why leadership practice has taken a distributed or dispersed form. Next I consider intensification and its connection with leadership. Finally, I address briefly some implications of distribution and intensification for the recent predilection of policy-makers for regimes of designer-leadership. ON LEADERSHIP Leadership is one of a family of terms in both academic and common usage, which is invoked to designate modes of human conduct and engagement. Historically, other close family members have included power, authority, influence, manipulation, coercion, force and persuasion. Within this discursive family, leadership has always been the favourite offspring. None of its siblings command anything like the reverence and respect with which leadership is adorned. But this hallowed status is puzzling, for leadership shares some of the defining attributes of its family members, more, in fact, than is normally credited. Unfortunately, however, there exists no ideal schematic arrangement with which to represent the connections between the meanings of this family of terms. It is difficult to conceive of them as positioned along a continuum, for example, for such an apparatus presupposes a linear set of relationships partitioned between two end-points or extremities, but then one has to ask: extremes of what, and should the spaces between the concepts be equi-distant or uneven? In his short, but much quoted, discussion Lukes (1974, p. 32) inserted this family of terms into an L-shaped conceptual space. Interestingly, Lukes excluded leadership but included inducement and encouragement. Let 60

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us begin slightly arbitrarily, then, with power which, along with influence, is the closest leadership family relative. It is not uncommon to hear power spoken of in the following ways: power structure, concentrations of power, powerful persons, empowerment, power elites or pluralities of power. There is some similarity here with authority, in that we also refer to such phenomena as authority structures, authority figures or authoritative persons. On the other hand, authority is usually thought of as a more constitutive term than power in the legitimation of human conduct, because authority establishes a legal framework or an order for action, although, perhaps slightly confusingly, an authority structure also confers ‘powers’ on office-holders, such as legislators or the judiciary. During the radical critique of behaviourist and liberal social theory during the 1970s and early 1980s, disputes about power oscillated between claim and counter-claim that it was a capacity or attribute of persons, or was evident in relationships between persons and the social structures that framed their actions. In the 30 Years’ War (or thereabouts) between the paradigms, the relational view has prevailed. But this was not so in the case of leadership where, until recently, a mostly underdetermined agency view of leadership has held sway. Briefly, an underdetermined view of agency is one which downplays the constraints on an individual’s actions, while exaggerating the individual’s capacities and opportunities for action. Leadership has this much in common with power: while power has become a term of critique over the last 25 or so years (thanks largely to Lukes), leadership is usually associated with the targets of that critique: the powerful. The actions of the powerful are legitimated by authority, including legally sanctioned armed force in the defence of the nation and coercion by the state. Oddly, the thing about leadership is that it is too immature a sibling to stand on its own feet, for it requires a fellow sibling, influence, to provide support. That is, when commentators try to define leadership, almost invariably they have to invoke influence to help them. Typical here is Rost (1993, p. 102, original text italicized) who, in his exhaustive conceptual review, defines leadership as ‘an influence relationship among leaders and followers who intend real changes that reflect their mutual purposes’. But this definition begs some questions: if leadership is a type, or part, of influence does that not make ‘leadership’ unnecessary? That is, if it is influence we are really talking about, then why not stay with that word? Why must influential conduct be elevated to the status of leadership? Rost’s definition introduces a binary or dualism between leaders and followers. So strong is the attributed symbiosis between these two analytical constructs that they are like the horse and carriage in the song about marriage: you cannot have one without the other. But why not? Why are organization members automatically assumed to fit into either of these binary categories? And why has the claim that there can be no leadership without followers become a truism? If we consider the other siblings, it is apparent that, with the possible exception of power, no other family member is portrayed in binary terms. In the case of power, the dualism

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of the powerful and the powerless is the closest one gets to anything as conceptually hard and fast as leaders and followers, and yet this power dichotomy has never been anywhere near as thoroughly embedded in the public or academic consciousness as the leader–follower binary. ON DISTRIBUTED LEADERSHIP The main reason why the leader–follower dualism retains its academic currency, as Calder (1977) pointed out, is less because ‘leadership’ describes a recognizable and agreed-upon form of behaviour, than because its symbolic force resonates powerfully with the lay public. Indeed, people have been shown to retain a strong romantic attachment to leadership and the research of numerous leadership theorists trades on that preference. An important corollary of this affection for leadership is a pervasive assumption that parallels the leader–follower binary, namely, that followers vastly outnumber leaders. That is, there is a belief that leaders are genuinely special individuals and few in number. This may be described as a focused view, in which leadership is seen as being monopolized or concentrated in one or a few hands. Suppose we consider the possibility, first raised by Gibb (1969) that, while it may be focused, organizational leadership is equally likely to be distributed. In the case of power, it is standard practice for political scientists to research patterns of power distribution in political and social systems. Indeed, in Who Governs?, a classic account of power in a US city, Dahl (1975, p. 90) described his focus as ‘the distribution of influence’ in his case study community. While Dahl did not use the expression ‘distributed leadership’, his investigation provides what is effectively an account of distributed leaders, in the sense that community influence was dispersed amongst a number of influential groups, rather than concentrated in one small elite and, from time to time, was expressed directly and indirectly by leader and sub-leader groups across a range of community-wide issues. But what about organizations? Are there patterns of organizational leadership corresponding to the dispersal of power and influence across a society? Gibb’s (1969, p. 215) claim was that, in organizations, ‘leadership is probably best conceived as a group quality, as a set of functions which must be carried out by the group’. But as a group function or set of operations, leadership could either be focused or distributed, and there was no ‘force in the nature of the leadership relation itself’, he said, ‘making for “focused” rather than “distributed” leadership’ (Gibb, 1968, p. 94). This idea of a dispersal of functions has been well captured by Spillane, Halverson and Diamond’s (2000, p. 6, original emphasis) idea of leaders’ practice as ‘stretched over the social and situational contexts of the school’. PATTERNS OF DISTRIBUTION A distributed view of leadership demands that we de-centre ‘the’ leader, a requirement that contradicts the ruling scholarly illusions of the last two decades or so which have privileged high-profile, vision-driven individuals

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who, allegedly, engineer transformational turnarounds. As I have pointed out elsewhere (Gronn, 2002b; 2002c), there are two main ways of thinking about de-centred, stretched leadership: as numerical sharing or dispersal and as conjoint agency. In the former case, the unit of analysis becomes 1+ or 1n leaders, i.e., potentially the entire organizational membership and, in the case of conjoint agency, it means plural-member work units. Until recently, with some notable exceptions (e.g., Sayles, 1964), the fondness of management and organization theorists for ‘the lone chief atop a pyramidal structure’ (Greenleaf, 1977, p. 61) has mostly veiled the realities of these working dynamics in a pall of ignorance. With the recent ‘discovery’ of distributed leadership, however, this cloud has begun to dissipate. As vehicles for concertive action, plural-member work units range from partnerships between two or more persons through to conventionally understood teams or even numerically larger groupings. They operate informally or their existence may be formalized and routinized. These units may either co-perform or collectively perform their work. In the former case, the individuals will be located together and work in shared time, whereas in the latter they may be separated in time and space, and be linked by asynchronous means of communication. There are three main types: spontaneous collaboration, intuitive working relations, and institutionalized and quasi-institutionalized practices. Spontaneous collaboration From time to time in organizations such as schools, colleagues with shared skills, interests and backgrounds come together deliberately in twos and threes to address a temporary difficulty. Equally, colleagues possessing different attributes may find themselves ‘thrown together’ inadvertently to attack common problems. These experiences provide opportunities for brief bursts of synergy which may come to nothing but which, because the individuals discover previously untapped work capacities, may stimulate further collaboration. The effect of colleagues’ co-ordinated effort is to facilitate conjoint agency through their cognitively aligned plans and reciprocally experienced influence patterns. A good illustration is the way the ‘morning round’ evolved between Audrey Proctor, a nursery-infant school head, and Julie Harris, her deputy (Nias, 1987, p. 39). Intuitive working relations Another form of concertive action is the intuitive understanding that emerges over time when two or more organization members come to rely on each other to accomplish their work. Examples are chief executives (CEOs) and their personal assistants (PAs) or school principals and their deputies. Here, joint leadership is evident in their shared role space. The working partnership becomes the focal unit that is attributed with leader status, by the members themselves and by their colleagues. This effective role sharing occurs when the members capitalize on their dependence on one another by balancing each other’s

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skills or, perhaps, because they are constrained to do so due to overlapping role responsibilities. Intuitive working relations are analogous to intimate interpersonal relations (e.g., friendships) in which the members trust one another unconditionally and blend their actions within an implicitly understood framework. Such an intuitive level of understanding explains how, for example, at a school assembly Julie Harris ‘fed Miss Proctor a cue which enabled her to comment on care in the use of crayons’ (Nias, 1987, p. 37). Institutionalized and quasi-institutionalized practices Distributed leadership may also occur in two, three, four or more multimember work units or even larger units such as teams. An example is the threesome comprised by Hodgson, Levinson and Zaleznik’s (1965) role constellation of senior hospital executives. Another is the couple formed by an Australian headmaster and the head of a new school campus (Gronn, 1999). Perhaps the most interesting recent example of institutionalized distributed leadership is the concept of partner principals. The models documented by Court (2001) include: split-task specialization (i.e., one principal for administration and one for curriculum); emergent split-task specialization (i.e., the division of labour is negotiated); alternating co-principals (i.e., turn-taking or simultaneous 50–50 job-sharing); and, rotation of responsibilities within a collective teacher leadership executive group (i.e., no-principal schools). Each of these patterns of distributed leadership rests on a changed set of assumptions about the rearticulation of work as part of a changing division of labour (see Gronn, 2002c, pp. 428, 432–4). Briefly, at the heart of a division of labour is an inherent tension between an imperative of differentiation, as tasks proliferate through increased specialization, and an imperative of integration, as these specialisms have to be rearticulated and combined in new work designs. The rearticulation of patterns of work alters existing forms of employee interdependence and the co-ordination of work activities. Interdependence concerns the fulfilment of role responsibilities. While some formal responsibilities may be discrete, others may overlap or complement one another. In practice, the degree of complementarity and overlap may be greater than is commonly acknowledged. Nias (1987, p. 31), for example, notes that ‘interdependence was a characteristic of the whole staff’ at her case study school and not just confined to the relationship between Proctor and Harris. Role complementarity and overlap suggest that the accomplishment of workplace responsibilities depends on reciprocal actions rather than solo performance. Co-ordination, on the other hand, refers to the alignment and management of the activities which, taken together, constitute particular work projects or the totality of ongoing work. Co-ordination is facilitated by a variety of scheduling, sequencing and control mechanisms. As part of the recent wave of school reform and restructuring in many countries, the introduction of new accountability policies has resulted in significant changes in the division of labour in schools. The adoption of policies of self-managed schooling, for example, has

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altered existing co-ordination patterns and interdependent relationships, and has also dramatically intensified the work of school leaders. INTENSIFIED WORK As with distributed leadership, there are numerous references to the intensification of school leaders’ work, particularly in the literature critiquing the recent wave of school reform. Intensification represents a strategic policy outcome that results in the de-professionalization or proletarianization of the work of school personnel (Blackmore, 1996). The phenomenon of intensification refers to new work practices which entail significantly increased levels of output, with expectations of output enshrined in employment contract-based performance indicators and productivity targets, with satisfactory target attainment rewarded through incentive bonus payments, and with contract renewal potentially prejudiced by nonattainment of targets. Adherence to these new effort norms requires amounts of physical, cognitive and emotional energy expenditure not contemplated previously. At the same time as these role demands and associated expectations increase, the scope for institutional-level autonomy and discretion is circumscribed by externally imposed budgetary and other resource constraints as part of a lean and mean policy rubric of ‘doing more with less’. In these circumstances, life ‘at the pointy end’ for those school leaders who mediate national- and state-level policies to local communities, such as principals, for example, is experienced as extremely demanding and stressful. Clarke and Newman (1997, p. 74) note how competing in the managerial career stakes has come to mean being able to demonstrate ‘commitment through long (often excessive) hours of work and being able to cope with high stress’: ‘Such intensification, linked to career uncertainty and occupational fragility, has a profound effect on both men and women, with implications for their children, partners and parents as well as their own quality of life.’ Data on intensification has been procured as part of the Monash University Readiness for Leadership project.2 One of the informants, a newly appointed principal, looks back over the 12 months since she assumed responsibility for a metropolitan primary school with an enrolment of about 270 children: ‘I’ve done 62 hours a week this week already without today [a Friday morning]. I was in last Sunday for 12 hours.’ In this lengthy extract, the new prinicipal describes her normal working day: When I get in here in the morning, which is normally between 7.30 and 7.45, I have to open my e-mail … I can’t read off the computer because I’ve got bad eyes so I download all the e-mails. Most of them have got attachments. METRO region so far this year [May: four months into the school year] have sent me and every other principal [indicates three ring binders] 426, 554, 120 e-mails … Now, that’s before I start. Any given morning I can have between six and eight e-mails with attachments that I have to open, read, take in, absorb, print and put in folders. That’s before I start a day. Then I have curriculum. I have to drive student

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welfare at this school. I drive it. All the change implementation, leadership team meetings, making sure that people are doing what they are supposed to be doing in classes. I don’t actually look at work programs because I don’t have time. The new ETWR [Experienced Teacher With Responsibility] process which is the new career structure, I interviewed all of my sub-12s, all of my Level-12 teachers who thought they were eligible for this thingo, for this promotion position. I had to read all the applications, there’s eight of them. We had to have meeting after meeting to decide our criteria etc. And then we had our interviews and we’ve had to look at all their documentation. Then I have to do all the bookwork for that which is all computer-generated. We’ve advertised teacher vacancies this year. We’ve got to do all of that. It just doesn’t end. And that’s the paper warfare. And then the dealing with the people stuff, like at the moment I am pushing aside. I’m, I’m, I’m keeping myself above the water level by staying in the office and ploughing through the paperwork. When I have finished that I can get back out and put most of my time into the people and children. But it’s just never ending. It’s just, and you have always got to respond, fill in pro formas and, drives you nuts. The workload is massive … And then you’ve got all this stuff you have to deal with like the unhappy parent, the parents’ club who want to talk to you about this, the school council president who wants to talk to you on the phone just to chat and, you know keep, keep up, be informed, and teachers who say ‘keep us informed’. It just goes on and on and on.

Immediately following this description, however, the newly appointed principal confessed: ‘But I love it’. COPING WITH INTENSIFICATION The newly appointed principal’s reflections graphically encapsulate a dualistic feature of role intensification: work pressures are experienced as both a challenge and a burden; a challenge to keep up and to meet their demands while wanting to do so (‘But I love it’), and wanting to be seen to be doing so, yet simultaneously feeling oppressed by the weight of them. There are also clear affinities between the newly appointed principal’s description and the characteristics of brevity, variety, fragmentation and interruption that Mintzberg (1973) claimed were intrinsic to managerial work, but there are also discontinuities, for the new performativity and accountability requirements that now frame leaders’ work have introduced significantly different qualitative demands. School leaders now have to mediate the prescriptions of policy while trying to respond to immediate contextual pressures and new division of labour imperatives pulling them towards greater levels of the aforementioned task interdependence and new modes of co-ordination. While the scope for creative agency might appear limited in such circumstances, documentation of a range of negotiated responses is beginning to accumulate. Alexiadou (2001) found that, with the introduction of quasi-market reforms to the UK Further Education (FE) sector, for example, institutional managers’ professional identities shifted in one of three directions: some were able to accommodate

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pragmatically to marketization while clinging to professional educational values, others chose to actively engage with market values and practices, while yet others became gung-ho entrepreneurs. When confronted by circumstances similar to those described by the newly appointed principal, some school leaders, like Boyle and Woods’s (1996) ‘Chris’, have reconstructed themselves as superleaders. Others, typified by Riseborough’s (1993) ‘Stan D. Fast’, have managed to immunize their schools from the intrusion of reform. Still others, despite the competitive marketized environment, have actively resisted through inter-school collaboration or outright policy subversion (Wallace, 1998). Next, while Reay and Ball’s (2000, p. 153) four female London comprehensive heads were (willingly) ‘conscripted into competitive ways of operating’, a commitment to feminist values, and contextual opportunities for their expression, enabled three New Zealand women secondary heads to craft strategies combining resistance, agreement and policy appropriation, thereby ameliorating the institutional impact of post-1989 neo-liberal reforms (Strachan, 1999). Finally, prospective school leaders have been disengaging. Older mid- and late-career teachers, for example, are starting to eschew institution-wide responsibilities beyond their classrooms (Gronn, 2003). ACCOUNTING FOR DISTRIBUTED AND INTENSIFIED WORK But why does leadership practice take a distributed and intensified form, and is there a link between these two phenomena? To the extent that commentators connect the two phenomena, they tend to answer these questions in one of two main ways. First, it is claimed that distributed work practice heightens the intensity of the work experience. In this explanation, distributed leadership per se is not mentioned, but vehicles for the dispersal and sharing of leadership, such as teams, are highlighted. The most benign version of this claim is that the team experience is cognitively stretching for the membership, because team-based work increases the ‘salience of the task demands by providing members with a broader perspective on their own work’ (Donnellon, 1996, p. 221). A more sinister version is that, in return for greater participation in decisions about work targets and operations, higher productivity is demanded of organization members for which they are expected to ‘give more time, to give more energy, to identify strongly with the goals and needs of their organization, and to learn how to collaborate effectively with coworkers’ (Barker, 1999, p. 11). Fully extended, the argument is that team-based work is controlled through an intimidating regulatory regime of panoptican-like peer discipline and surveillance. A second explanation links the emergence of distributed leadership to the consequences of new public management (NPM) accountability policies. As Court (2001, p. 21) notes, an assumption which informs NPM is distrust, i.e., that public sector professionals are motivated by ‘acquisitiveness and a desire to increase their own power and status’ and, consequently, ‘provider capture’. In parallel with these allegations, as part of a reassertion of the need

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for ‘leadership’, NPM’s proponents have also demonized management, especially corporate middle managers, tiers of which were ‘hollowed out’ through downsizing in numerous organizations over the last decade and a half. Thus, with better educated workforces, organizations allow workers to manage their own work and then ‘downsize their unneeded managers’ (Barker, 1999, p. 7). A consequence, according to Grey (1999, p. 572), is that ‘we are all managers now’, because the possibility is opened up that management as a function ceases to be the monopoly of a cadre of elite career specialists. But displaced middle managers are antithetical to distributed structures such as teams, notes Donnellon (1996, p. 155), because they see these as infringing their traditional authority and control. Another consequence of NPM’s proponents framing of ‘management’ and ‘managers’ (as traditionally understood) as part of the problem of inefficiency, is that the survivors (i.e., existing and potential managers) feel betrayed. One response to distrust and their alleged redundancy is the aforementioned disengagement. With the expansion of individual role space under NPM-style accountability, therefore, and with expectations of higher productivity as part of performance-based work contracts, school managers, particularly principals, have had to find creative ways of accomplishing their work by delegating the task load. It should be noted, however, that delegated authority is not necessarily synonymous with distributed leadership, for those to whom tasks are delegated may not be perceived as leaders when performing them. The effect of delegation is to create a range of formal and informal working arrangements which may or may not entail democratic power-sharing and opportunities for dispersed or shared leadership, and which are intended at least partly to compensate for role intensification. Both of these explanations foreground social changes in the division of school leadership labour. But for the sake of completeness, these need to be linked with developments in the technological side of the division of labour. Thanks to the introduction of information and communication technology (ICT) systems, schools, like many corporate and human service organizations, are located in complex data-rich, information-saturated task environments. The increased adoption of networked ICT by school leaders, for example, is both a medium and an outcome of changes in the technical component of the division of labour. On the one hand, ICT is an outcome of change, in that schools are now computer-networked to local authorities, regions, central offices and service providers. These links facilitate e-mail connections, Internet access and data search capabilities that are intended to enhance student learning. As a medium, on the other hand, the provision of ICT has altered the division of labour by imposing numerous new official accountability demands on schools. In Victoria, for example, schools are required to record an extensive amount of student cohort performance data in English and Mathematics, along with survey data on school management, environment and resources, onto a central database where, for purposes of a triennial review process, it is benchmarked against state-wide and Like School Group norms. These kinds of accountability demands intensify work because of the scale and scope of the

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information required, and the telescoping of the deadlines for their transmission. Thus, networked ICT transforms schools into simultaneous beneficiaries and victims. On the one hand, students are provided with potentially expanded access to infinite information space and flexible learning environments and, for school leaders, ICT facilitates improved co-ordination across campuses, in the case of multi-site schools, and between institutional partners, in the case of school clusters. On the other hand, school leaders are at the mercy of highly intrusive, remote and speedier information control systems which generate the kind of message volumes engulfing the newly appointed principal, thereby augmenting the constraints on schools and limiting their discretion for independent action. IMPLICATIONS OF DISTRIBUTED AND INTENSIFIED LEADERSHIP As yet, the full implications of this changed work order have yet to be fully catalogued. To the extent that the social and institutional costs of NPM reform are experienced as de-professionalization, then work intensification may be fuelling leadership disengagement and corroding the willingness of teachers to be good organizational citizens. A sense of de-professionalization is likely to result when the scope for independent individual and collective agency in workplace decision-making is dramatically circumscribed. Deprofessionalization is experienced as the diminution of previous policy autonomy and discretion. It is likely to have long-term effects in that career identities are being reconstructed in the direction of increasing workplace servility rather than empowerment. That is, school personnel under self-managing schooling are experiencing externally imposed controls as evidence of highly demanding and greedy systems, in which they are required to work increasingly at the beck and call of remotely located external officials, rather than their immediate school peers. Intensification may be central to the reworking of teachers’ professional identities, therefore, because it automatically implicates them in a revised understanding of their commitments as work colleagues, and a reassessment of their overall career trajectories and plans. At a personal level, both intensification and distribution call forth whole new sets of leadership attributes. One early prototype of leadership under conditions of distribution, in a study which took the division of labour as its analytical focus, but in an era preceding intensification, is found in Sayles’s (1964) Managerial Behavior. Here, following extended fieldwork, manager-leaders were shown to be less the hierarchically defined occupants of roles who initiated ordered sets of relations in accordance with the fine-grained legalisms of their employment contracts, than role incumbents who were immersed in problem-solving amidst workflows and processes. In the absence of similar recent detailed empirical studies of changes in the division of labour and their impact, but with the imperatives of interdependence and co-ordination which were mentioned earlier in mind, the following brief list of attributes is

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necessarily indicative. With contemporary distributed leadership, the successful development of new employee synergies, for example, would appear to require a capacity to articulate previously invisible and tacit dimensions of role performance. Distributed leadership also seems to demand a new forbearance for reciprocity and interdependency, the ability to cope with a sense of impermanence, a willingness to continually restructure procedures in the search for successful operational formulae, a finely tuned tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty, and heightened negotiation skills. Emotionally, school leaders need to be willing to withstand acute personal pressures, display a capacity for emotional containment, and acquire a sense of how events coalesce, fuse and flow. They are also likely to find themselves constantly repositioning and aligning themselves and their schools in response to market pressures and movements, and working in increasingly multicultural work environments requiring cultural sensitivity and understandings of cultural norms. The earlier lengthy extract from the newly appointed principal shows a principal grappling with some of these new tensions. On the one hand, we witness an individual whose actions, in her endeavour to get across all of the detail, as it were, seem to be evidence of a focused, rather than a distributed, pattern of work. This is indicated by her constant use of ‘I’. On the other hand, this extract is not about leadership and whether the newly appointed principal is perceived as a leader, for the focusing in question is the focusing of responsibilities on her as the accountable school-level manager. That is, all of the external and situational constraints to which she alludes in the extract come to her by virtue of the way school-level accountability works, for as the principal, the newly appointed principal is answerable for the entirety of school operations. DESIGNS FOR LEADERS Despite the confluence of factors that produce intensified and distributed leadership, the latest wave of school reform has generated an entirely new discourse for legitimating the roles of school leaders. This new mandate for the leadership of schools is a system of ‘designer-leadership’ (Gronn, 2002a), with designs for leaders embodied increasingly in national, normative sets of competency standards, for which the UK’s NPQH, LPSH and HEADLAMP schemes, and the ILLSC standards in the USA are prototypical. Designs for leaders intrude significantly into the domain of school leaders’ work because they operate through highly structured and externally imposed regimes of assessment and accreditation, the intention of which is to license or authorize the initial appointments of education professionals and to guarantee their continuing engagement in professional practice in conformity with sets of desired norms. For this reason, the adoption of designer leadership represents a new weapon in the armoury of professional governance and control. This trend is significant for at least two reasons. First, standards entail a new

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discursive and regulatory apparatus for legitimating new understandings of professional practice, which shifts control of that definition away from the profession to various auditing bodies. Second, standards introduce a new mode of leader formation in which the production of leaders is customized to the needs of user-systems rather than in accordance with the stipulations of traditional providers (e.g., universities). The outcome of customization is a reprofessionalization (or perhaps de-professionalization or even proletarianization) of the production of occupational identities. In this way, historic patterns of voluntarist, pluralistic identity construction are yielding to centralized, monocultural norm imposition and forms of standardization that de-legitimate and minimize variations in personal career passage. The realities of distributed leadership are at odds with leader design specifications, for the latter embody, explicitly or implicitly, a heroic or focused leader prototype. As to the intensification of practice, this means, as we have seen, subjecting oneself as a leader to a self-imposed regime of disciplined work performance. It also entails manoeuvring within potentially infinite information space and greatly expanded role space, being constrained by massively increased task demands and tightly telescoped time frames, being subjected to heightened external surveillance through auditing and monitoring regimes, and having to internalize possible values dissonance and absorb the costs of emotional stress. Standards-based designs for school leaders, with their extensive bullet-point lists of performance norms, are likely to exacerbate the experience of an intensified work order and consolidate teachers’ leadership disengagement. This is because, by ‘raising the bar’ of heroic performance expectations even higher, standards provide yet another strong disincentive for teachers to aspire to leadership as a career goal. Despite this possibility, intensification is now part of a calculated game of identifying heroic leaders. The structured interview technique forming part of the Gallup profile for the identification and assessment of leadership potential (cited in Tomlinson and Holmes, 2001, p. 113), for example, asserts that ‘talented people’ use ‘more intensifiers and have more emotional commitment’. Moreover, the life themes recorded over 30 years in Gallup’s library of ‘highly effective performers’ focus on: ‘the intensity of the performer’s drive for task completion, based on a keen awareness of the leader’s strengths, which are underpinned by a values system and a determination to help others achieve quality’. With intensification now considered by many to be a virtue, it remains to be seen whether potential school leaders will eschew the opportunity to provide the exceptional performance now associated with leadership. CONCLUSION In this chapter, I identified two contemporary features of school leadership, distributed and intensified work. While intensification was shown to be a creature of the reconstitution of leadership under NPM-style accountability

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and performativity policy frameworks, regimes of intensified work are also facilitated and consolidated by networked ICT systems. And while distributed leadership has surfaced as many school leaders seek to compensate for the effects of intensified work by expanding the critical mass of organizational leadership, it has also become more prevalent as a result of new electronic communications systems. The possibility was also raised, however, by reference to an earlier generation of studies, that distributed leadership has not so much been ‘discovered’ as ‘rediscovered’, due to the awareness that interdependence, rather than follower-dependence, provides the empirical foundation for leadership. Finally, it was shown that recent leadership development policies, far from acknowledging the distributed realities of practice, tend to contradict them, and that these policies take for granted the reality of intensified work as a desired norm. Faced with the unintended consequence of impending leader disengagement, however, these design assumptions may be unlikely to prove sustainable in the long term. NOTES 1. I wish to thank Dr Felicity Rawlings for her helpful comments on an earlier version of this chapter. 2. I am grateful to the Monash Small Grants Scheme for funding this project.

REFERENCES Alexiadou, N. (2001) Management identities in transition: a case study from further education, Sociological Review, 49(3), 412–435. Barker, J.R. (1999) The Discipline of Teamwork: Participation and Concertive Control. London: Sage. Blackmore, J. (1996) Doing ‘emotional labour’ in the education market place: stories from the field of women in management, Discourse, 17(3), 337–49. Boyle, M. and Woods, P. (1996) The composite head: coping with changes in the primary headteachers’ role, British Educational Research Journal, 22(5), 549–68. Calder, B.J. (1977) An attribution theory of leadership, in B.M. Staw and G.R. Salancik (eds), New Directions in Organizational Behavior (pp. 179–204). Chicago, IL: St. Clair. Clarke, J. and Newman, J. (1997) The Managerial State: Power, Politics and Ideology in the Remaking of Social Welfare. London: Sage. Court, M. (2001) Collaborative or managerial? Reviewing studies of co-principalships and shared teacher initiatives. Paper presented to the annual conference of the British Educational Research Association, Leeds. Dahl, R.A. (1975) Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Donnellon, A. (1996) Team Talk: The Power of Language in Team Dynamics. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press. Gibb, C.A. (1968) Leadership: psychological aspects, in D.L. Sills (ed.), International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 9 (pp. 91–101). New York: Free Press/ Macmillan.

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Gibb, C.A. (1969) Leadership, in G. Lindzey and E. Aronson (eds), The Handbook of Social Psychology, vol. 4 (2nd edn) (pp. 205–83). Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Greenleaf (1977) Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness. New York: Paulist Press. Grey, C. (1999) ‘We are all managers now’; ‘we always were’: on the development and demise of management, Journal of Management Studies, 36(5), 561–85. Gronn, P. (1999) Substituting for leadership: the neglected role of the leadership couple, Leadership Quarterly, 10(1), 41–62. Gronn, P. (2002a) Designer-leadership: the emerging global adoption of preparation standards, Journal of School Leadership, 12(5), 552–78. Gronn, P. (2002b) Distributed leadership, in K. Leithwood and P. Hallinger (eds), Second International Handbook of Educational Leadership and Administration, (pp. 653–96). Dordrecht: Kluwer. Gronn, P. (2002c) Distributed leadership as a unit of analysis, Leadership Quarterly, 13(4), 423–51. Gronn, P. (2003) The New Work of Educational Leaders: Changing Leadership Practice in an Era of School Reform. London: Sage/Paul Chapman Publishing. Hodgson, R.C., Levinson, D.J. and Zaleznik, A. (1965) The Executive Role Constellation: An Analysis of Personality and Role Relations in Management. Boston, MA: Harvard University, Graduate School of Business Administration. Lukes, S. (1974) Power: A Radical View. London: Macmillan. Mintzberg, H. (1973) The Nature of Managerial Work. New York: Harper and Row. Nias, J. (1987) One finger, one thumb: a case study of the deputy head’s part in the leadership in a nursery/infant school, in G. Southworth (ed.), Readings in Primary School Management (pp. 30–53). London: Falmer. Reay, D. and Ball, S.J. (2000) Essentials of female management: women’s ways of working in the education market place. Educational Management & Administration, 28(2), 145–59. Riseborough, G. (1993) Primary headship, state policy and the challenge of the 1990s: an exceptional story that disproves total hegemonic rule, Journal of Educational Policy, 8(2), 155–73. Rost, J.C. (1993) Leadership for the Twenty-First Century, Westport, CT: Praeger. Sayles, L.R. (1964) Managerial Behavior: Administration in Complex Organizations. New York: McGraw-Hill. Spillane, J.P., Halverson, R. and Diamond, J.B. (2000) Towards a theory of leadership practice: a distributed perspective. Working paper, Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University. Strachan, J. (1999) Feminist educational leadership in a New Zealand neo-liberal context, Journal of Educational Administration, 37(2), 121–38. Tomlinson, H. and Holmes, G. (2001) Assessing leadership potential: fast track to school leadership, Journal of Educational Administration, 39(2), 104–17. Wallace, M. (1998) A counter-policy to subvert education reform: collaboration among schools and colleges in a competitive climate, British Educational Research Journal, 24(2), 195–215.

SECTION 2

THE PERSPECTIVES IN PRACTICE

5 Challenging Circumstances: The Role of Distributed and Intensified Leadership MEGAN CRAWFORD

INTRODUCTION Individual views on leadership have the power to stimulate strong debate. For example, there are many dangers inherent in the aggrandizement of leadership, one being that potentially good leaders in education may be daunted by the view of leadership that they see being offered as exemplars for them. In Chapter 4 in this book, Gronn calls this the heroic or focused leader prototype. Different perspectives do need to be explored carefully in order to try and understand the helpfulness and explanatory power of those perceptions. It is most important to look at Gronn’s chapter in this volume with the current burdens of expectation about leadership from policy-makers firmly in mind. My research relates to schools in challenging contexts, for which a heroic leader is often seen, by the popular press as the answer. Gronn begins with the suggestion that an informed understanding of the leadership of schools requires an appreciation of two interrelated phenomena: the distributed pattern of leaders’ work and the intensification of work practices. In order to explore these further, this chapter looks at one particular situation, that of an English primary school subject to ‘special measures’ as a result of its inspection by the national inspectorate, and reanalyses some of the empirical data from the perspective of distributing and intensifying school leadership. The initial research was inspired by Conger and Kanungo (1998), who have researched extensively into the area of charismatic leadership in the business sector. They reiterate the finding that leaders and their contexts are intertwined in a complex and intimate fashion. During a time of crisis, they propose that any environment is more receptive to leadership in general, and likely to be open to proposals for radical change. The chapter asks if this research provides some further or complementary insights into the relationship between leadership and the process of creating 77

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effective educational organizations, especially in the context of challenging circumstances. In particular, I ask whether Gronn’s viewpoint provides extra illumination into our understanding of the nature of leadership in such schools. First, the circumstances of one particular school in challenging circumstances are discussed and the key issues for the leadership of that school. Secondly, I shall use the metaphor of the leadership family to explore participants’ perceptions about what constitutes effectiveness as a leader in such a situation, whilst at the same time discussing distributed leadership. Finally, Gronn’s ideas about the nature of leadership will be related to the empirical data. SCHOOLS SUBJECT TO SPECIAL MEASURES The Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED) (1996) defines schools found to be ‘in need of Special Measures’ as ‘Schools where the inspector concludes that the school is failing to give its pupils an acceptable standard of education’. The core concerns that OFSTED (1996) has identified across schools in special measures are: ● ● ●

the under achievement and low levels of attainment of the pupils; a high proportion of unsatisfactory teaching; ineffective leadership.

Special measures include the submission of an Action Plan, which identifies how the key issues will be dealt with for approval by the Secretary of State for Education and Employment, monitoring by Her Majesty’s Inspectors (HMI) of the implementation of the Action Plan, and regular reports to the Secretary of State on the school’s progress. Schools must demonstrate that the necessary steps are being taken to address the key issues identified in the inspection report. In general terms a failing school is expected to improve and be close to providing an acceptable standard of education within two years of being deemed to need Special Measures. Ferguson et al. (2000) suggest that schools in disadvantaged areas are more likely than those in stable communities to be judged harshly. They also note (ibid., p. 103) that only one in a hundred schools with a high proportion of socially disadvantaged children receive ‘very good’ inspection reports compared with one in five of those with only a small proportion of such children. Past histories of such schools (Gray et al., 1999, p. 73) are spelt out in writings in this area: All experienced significant changes in the composition of their catchment areas, problems with the local communities, difficulties in managing falling pupil numbers, budget restraints and the threat of closure. In addition, they have been characterized by low staff morale, general developmental apathy, and low levels of pupil performance … improvement from such a baseline represents a formidable challenge.

The office for Standard in Education, in their publication Lessons Learned from Special Measures (OFSTED, 1999), concludes that: ‘no single solution

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will serve as a panacea to remedy all the ills that befall schools’ (ibid., p. 2). Law and Glover (1999) also suggest that OFSTED has a reluctance to recognize success even when the school is judged on value-added measures or presents evidence to show that it has improved considerably since the last inspection. This special measures context is important to note as it provides a particular framework within which Gronn’s chapter can be discussed. THE RESEARCH The research was a three-year, single-site case study. It was predicated on the assumption that a contemporary phenomenon such as special measures can be investigated in depth, and over time. By using multiple sources of evidence for triangulation (interviews, participant observation, HMI reports, and documentary study), the school was investigated in some detail. Semi-structured interviews were carried out once a term with all the headteachers involved, all governors meetings were observed and recorded, in order to verify each headteachers’ account of the events. School documents (minutes of meetings, HMI/local education authority [LEA] monitoring reports) were also consulted in order to avoid as much as possible anecdotalism or subjectivity. In order to triangulate further, interviews were also held with other key respondents (deputy heads, Key Stage co-ordinators, two LEA officials, a cross-section of staff). This type of research allows very close access to the feelings and actions of participants at all levels within what was at times, an emotionally charged environment. Over the time the school was studied there was almost total staff change. Only two of the original staff remained over the three years of the study, and there were (at differing times) four deputies, two for short periods only. These changes were not all caused by the situation of the school, and the majority of them occurred during the first two years in special measures. At the start of the research the main priority for both the school and the researcher, was to preserve the anonymity of the school, and especially not to add in any way to the pressure already on the staff. The original emphasis of the research was, first, the nature of leading in terms of a primary school that was deemed to require special measures. Secondly, it asked how useful the Conger and Kanungo conceptualization of charisma in business settings is to an ‘acting’ head in special measures situations. THE CONTEXT Almond Tree Combined School1 was formed in 1995 by the amalgamation of two established schools, a 5 to 8 first school and an 8 to 12 middle school. Upon amalgamation, the middle school headteacher, Michael Cresswell became the head of the combined school (ages 5–12). The school was located on the edge of a large city, and served an established local authority housing estate. There were seven classes with an average class size of 29.7 (LEA average 28.2). It had a greater than average number of pupils with learning difficulty (36 per cent, LEA average 19 per cent), and many of these had

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behavioural and emotional problems as well. Forty-six per cent of children were entitled to free school meals (LEA average 15 per cent), and 11 per cent had English as a second language (LEA average 4 per cent). Annual pupil turnover was 40 per cent, as compared with an LEA average of 11 per cent. There was a large budget deficit at the time of the original OFSTED inspection. The school was inspected in February 1997, and placed under special measures. Roll at the time was about 200. They reported that there were significant weaknesses: ‘Leadership is weak in all respects. There is no firm direction established by the Headteacher. Too much time is spent dealing with day-to-day crises.’ There were many other issues, including poor quality teaching, poor behaviour and failure to fully implement the National Curriculum. The HMI commented of Almond Tree School (Monitoring report, 1999): ‘The contextual factors of this school are worthy of note … these challenges add to those of a school population with generally poor learning skills on entry’. Almond Tree needed to recover from the recognized failure of being in special measures. The pressure for fast action from the various agencies (LEA and central government) was intense. The LEA, because of the effect having failing schools might do to its reputation, needed to demonstrate a bias for action, and that change had to be as visible to all the stakeholders (OFSTED, Department for Education and Employment [DFEE]) as soon as possible. An official from OFSTED asked the headteacher on the phone when he would ‘find the exit window’. To begin to tackle these concerns, the LEA appointed an experienced ‘mentor’ head from a local middle school, David Simmons. His brief was to help the headteacher and the senior management prepare the post-OFSTED Action Plan. He then became acting headteacher when Mr Cresswell became ill and took extended sick leave in the summer term of 1997. There was uncertainty for almost a year whilst Mr Cresswell debated whether his future lay within the school or elsewhere. David Simmons was in post for two terms, leaving at Easter 1998 because his own substantive school was due to have its own OFSTED inspection. Another experienced headteacher, Mike White, was seconded from Easter 1998 to December 1998. A substantive head, Jane Davis, was finally appointed in January 1999. Almond Tree was removed from the list of schools subject to special measures in the summer of 2000. THE LEADERSHIP FAMILY AND ITS FORMS AT ALMOND TREE As Gronn (p. 60, this volume) perceptively writes: Leadership is one of a family of terms in both academic and common usage, which is invoked to designate modes of human conduct and engagement. Historically, other close family members have included power, authority, influence, manipulation, coercion, force and persuasion. Within this discursive family leadership has always been the favourite offspring.

He contends that power and influence are the closest leadership family relatives. This intriguing metaphor allows me to look again at some of the

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classifications already given to forms of leadership at the school. In particular, in my original analysis, I had paid considerable attention to the idea of charisma, and its role in the creation of ‘leadership’ as a crucial factor in school success. Charisma might well be seen as power and influence’s spindoctor. Grint in his work on leadership as art (Grint, 2000, p. 419) suggests that we can visualize leadership as a talisman that we use instinctively, but we can never be sure whether it works or not. The idea of charisma is talismanic, and is deftly woven into popular perception in England through the idea of a ‘Superhead’ who can be sent in to rescue a school from difficulties. Weber (1947) identified charismatic authority as one of the three main methods of claiming legitimacy in social settings. He describes it as a form of authority based on perceptions of an extraordinary individual. The importance of Weber’s critique to the argument here is that he developed the idea that the leader derives his or her role from the belief the followers have about his or her mission. Charismatic leadership has been the centre of considerable methodical empirical study. Studies have focused on the transformational (Bass and Avolio, 1993), behavioural (House and Howell, 1992), and attribution aspects of charismatic leadership (Conger and Kanungo, 1987; 1988). Howell (1997) suggests that there is general accord among writers in the leadership field that charismatic leaders often emerge during times of instability, crisis and turmoil. She puts it succinctly when she states that any challenging circumstance: ‘Increases the likelihood that people will feel helpless, agitated, anxious and frustrated and will therefore eagerly accept the authority of charismatic leaders who appear to be uniquely qualified to lead them out of their acute distress’. (ibid., p. 2). This longing for certainty and security is not surprising, given very difficult circumstances. Bass (1990) also proposes that differences in charisma can be attributed not only to the exceptional individual, but also to the exceptional situation and to the interaction between them. The Conger–Kanungo model (1998) suggests that it is the organizational members that attribute charisma to those in leadership positions. Conger and Kanungo’s research sees charisma as not dependent on the outcome, but on the actions taken by the leader. They conceptualize that a charismatic leader is primarily concerned with influencing the followers to accept and own a vision and to work together towards its realization. The leader uses strategies and techniques to make followers feel empowered within a situation. They perceive charisma as attributed by followers to the leader and based on the premise of the leader giving empowerment to the followers. They argue that empowering organizational members can achieve transformational effects. Bass and Avolio (1993) emphasize the role of charisma in enabling the leader to influence followers by arousing strong emotions and identification with the leader – emotional arousal creating a sense of excitement about what has to be done. They suggest that charismatic leaders also use language to align the followers to the mission. This language may be laced with a strong, convincing delivery, conveying pride and confidence.

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This seems particularly relevant when analysing leadership in special measures where morale was low, and motivation ebbing away. It appears that charismatic leaders have their major effects on the emotions and self-esteem of followers – the affective motivational variables rather than the cognitive variables. Gronn suggests that leadership is too immature a sibling to manage without influence (p. 61, this volume) to help it out. Charisma can be conceptualized as a very close relation of influence, and thus also a sibling of leadership. It may be that certain situations do require what Gronn calls the leader design specifications that personify either explicitly or implicitly a heroic leader prototype. If uncertain situations need leadership certainties, the role of influence, as Gronn notes, calls in the dualism of the powerful and the powerless. But even in what appears to be a clear-cut situation where such dualism may figure particularly strongly, this is not always the case. So, in the case study school, I had originally looked at the role of charisma, especially as perceived by the staff in terms of the three headteachers. This concurs with Gronn’s description of leadership’s symbolic force that has a particular resonance with the lay public. DISTRIBUTING SCHOOL LEADERSHIP If a distributed view of leadership demands that we de-centre the leader, what does my data say about it? Looking again at the original material in terms of distributing and intensifying school leadership has uncovered a number of new aspects. Overall, the single most popular theme that emerges is the role of the headteacher, particularly in terms of morale and confidence building. This was particularly true during the early stages of the research. This chimes with Gronn’s description of intensification and will be returned to later. Gronn suggests that for leadership to be distributed, plural-member work units are needed (p. 63, this volume). He identifies three main types of such work units: spontaneous collaboration, intuitive working relations, and institutionalized and quasi-institutionalized practices. In my data, the latter has the most relevance over time, with the head and the two deputies forming institutionalized practices. The theme of the deputy headteacher and Headteacher as centres for the changes that took place in the school late on, can also be seen as linked to Ogawa’s argument (Chapter 2) that leadership is about allowing the development of teacher knowledge and capability. However, it is important to note this sincerely felt need to have someone to lean on. It is seen strongly in the responses from teachers: The children, teachers and parents felt better when David was here. (Teacher KS2) He would say ‘you know what you’re doing – get on with it’, which gave confidence and was positive, especially for the nursery. (Teacher KS1)

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He was effective because people needed a strong leader at that time. (Teacher KS2)

The findings of the first monitoring inspection by HMI in January 1998 states: ‘It is evident that the present acting Headteacher has done much to move the school forward, to raise morale, and give the staff a sense of purpose’. This leads to a paradox. Staff seemed to demand a figurehead to whom they could pin their hopes of recovery, and this enabled them, and the LEA to begin to feel that the school was moving forward. This links to the research above on the charismatic leader and reflects that need in times of crisis to have the talisman of a strong leader (Grint, 2000). On the other hand, this leads to a state of dependency, which may have contributed to the time the school spent subject to special measures. In particular, over the three years different members of the senior management team (SMT) (two of the Heads and one deputy) spoke of the lack of ownership by the staff of what was happening to them: No one takes responsibility for anything – the dinner times, the state of the buildings. It’s as if they have been kept in the dark for a long time and patronized, although it was probably done for the best of motives. (Jane Davis, Head, 1999) I said to them ‘What are you going to do about it?’ (Mike White, Head, 1998) The staff when I arrived were spending money on Lifebuoy, washing their hands and standing back! (Deputy head, 1999)

This dependency also has its downside for the heroic leader figure. INTENSIFICATION OF LEADERSHIP Gronn calls it life ‘at the pointy end’ for those school leaders who mediate national- and state-level policies to local communities. They see it as extremely demanding and stressful. From the point of view of the heads in my case study, there was a great intensification in what they did. Acting headship in special measures was much more challenging than their substantive headships, right from the start of their tenure. Even Jane, the new substantive head, found it much more demanding than her previous position, due, she felt, to the juxtaposition of special measures and social challenge. She found the first term particularly gruelling. Sustaining this type of leadership behaviour required an intense emotional labour. David, the first acting head stated: It’s very tiring, the paperwork and the waking up at 5:15 am and thinking about things – like today there was planning that needed my attention. It takes a huge

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amount out of you, and there is only so much energy and amount of time you can put in, the high profile for the behaviour round school, paperwork. It’s a huge task … I found myself crying at something on television and I am not a crier.

This inner struggle was not obvious to the staff, as the upbeat nature of his public face was most commented on. As mentioned earlier, statements about him invariably contained references to his upbeat mood, and positive aspect. It is debatable, however, how long this perceived invulnerability would have lasted. By the end of two terms, his old back problems had returned, necessitating days off. In contrast, Jane Davis, was perceived in the following terms: ‘Tranquillity is strength of her character’ (deputy head); ‘Jane is calm with an underlying forcefulness’. (teacher KS2). She felt that this perception was due to the phenomenon she described as ‘ducks’ – calm on the surface with a great deal of paddling going on underneath. Certainly she found herself vulnerable to intestinal ailments and feelings of exhaustion that at times threatened to overwhelm her. This is where she found the value of having others on the team more prepared, as time went by, to take on challenges themselves, and not rely just on her. Hochschild’s (1983) concept of emotional labour is the most useful explanatory device that I have discovered for this. She suggests that emotion should be seen as any other sense, as a way of knowing about the world, and testing for reality in any given situation. Her key premise is that we need emotional awareness in order to reflect on our external or ‘objective’ world as well as our inner one. She develops this into the concept of ‘emotional labour’. ‘Emotional labour’ requires you to bring to public sight or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward expression that produces the state of mind that you want others to have. It means that the person has to work very hard at co-ordinating mind and feeling. A leader in challenging circumstances would need a great deal of emotional labour, as, like acting, such a position does require being on the stage full time. Hochschild says that emotional labour takes place when the work involves face-to-face contact with the public, where the person is required to produce emotional states in others, e.g., fear, courage, and where the person has to exercise a degree of control of the emotional activities of staff. This connects with the emotional commitment suggested by Conger and Kanungo, and may be one of the outward ways that charisma can be expressed. As Gronn suggests, if this sort of intensification is considered a virtue, will school leaders want to provide it, as the long-term rewards for them may lie in loss of physical or mental well-being? My research agrees with him that the current accountability and policy frameworks facilitate and consolidate intensified work practices. As he says, ‘these policies take for granted intensified work as a desired norm … these design assumptions are unlikely to be sustainable in the long term’. This was certainly the reality in my case study.

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A PARADOXICAL TRUTH? How is this apparent paradox to be reconciled? Is charisma a false hope, and distributed leadership the way forward? The answer to this probably lies in emphasizing the truth of the paradox, by viewing the school’s leadership journey in three distinct stages. In the first stage, or ‘heroic leader’, staff define the headteacher as charismatic (using Conger and Kanungo’s identifiers), and this seems to give hope, and build necessary morale in a difficult situation. Conger (1989) speculates that the more favourable the existing conditions to charisma, the less magnitude or the fewer the number of charismatic attributes are required for the leader to be perceived as charismatic by the followers. Thus, David Simmons was perceived as having these attributes, being someone who raised morale, clearly tied into his grasp of the necessity of fast response, and what several staff described as his ‘outgoing’ personality. The latter characteristic, which might be viewed as a lucky personal fit to the school, should be viewed in the light of Simmons’s conscious desire to be positive, often mentioned during interviews. In the second stage, ‘false institutionalization’, it may appear that the heroic leader was enough to effect transformation, but this is a false effect. Conger and Kanungo (1998) also characterize charisma as an unstable phenomenon, particularly in terms of leadership succession. and draw attention to the point that charismatic leadership, in particular, is seldom, if ever, institutionalized successfully. Conger and Kanungo (1998, p. 21) also suggest that a dilemma builds up for many followers because, as the followers’ self-worth is increasingly defined in their relationship to the leader, a ‘precarious dependence’ is built. This may help explain some of the comments of some teaching staff concerning the second replacement headteacher, of which the following is a clear example: ‘When David left there was another void’ (senior teacher KS2). Jones and Webber (2001, pp. 4–5) argue that when leaders come in from outside the school culture, they can experience an increased vulnerability and a decrease in trust, often because of the successor’s willingness to challenge the norms of the organization. This did not happen with the first headteacher, perhaps because the norms had already been challenged so effectively by the OFSTED inspection. The second headteacher, Mike White commented: I’ve tried to get to know staff. In meetings with staff, I have taken the opportunity to revisit some of the areas that we need to develop this term, and probably beyond and I’ve prepared quite detailed action plans. We’ve discussed the outstanding issues, and got them agreed with staff. There’s now quite a clear timetable in terms of the issues that we’re going to tackle. I recognize that my style of management is very different to Dave’s and I have to give a little bit of time for staff to adjust to me.

However, because of the school’s special measures situation time was the one thing that White did not have. Two HMI monitoring visits took place during

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this period, and although the school was seen to be making reasonable progress, this was judged: ‘to be having limited impact within the classroom’. Special measures calls for a turnaround within a specified time limit, and this affects the behaviours adopted by those in all leadership positions, but it is specifically the Headteacher who has to be seen to act by the LEA, the local community and, often, demoralized staff. The special measures context also lends itself to according the headteacher disproportionate effectiveness in school turnaround situations. In his conceptualization of organizational context Conger (1989) draws on the outer context, beyond the organization, and the inner context of culture, structure and power. For quick removal from special measures, the external context – how the school is viewed – becomes more crucial. This perception management was a particular strength of David Simmons. Structure is also amenable to some quick change, but the failing school’s culture and power distribution will take longer. The third stage, ‘long term leadership’, equates with Louis and Miles (1992), i.e., that improving schools develop successful long-term strategies for cultural change. For consistent improvement to flourish, leadership as an organizational quality had to emerge (Ogawa and Bossert, 1997). As the substantive headteacher, Jane Davis, comments: ‘For me it was all about longer terming and taking responsibility’. Developing teacher capability from 1999 onwards was helped by the LEA, which allowed the school to have two deputies in place in order to free up the headteacher to concentrate on more strategic tasks. One of these two deputies, Paul, describes his first impression of the school when he arrived in 1999. It seemed to me horrendous, very little policy and if there was, little adherence to it. I’d say that they [the staff ] were wallowing in special measures. It was as if any problems there were for someone else to sort out. There was no ownership and the kids were getting a poor deal. Lots of old guard thinking and behaviour – the outlook that had failed the school. My approach was to say to them ‘Look, it’s not as bad as you think.’ There was no point in them being miserable, vegetating, or sitting in judgement. They weren’t expending their energy to give the kids a good deal. When I came they tried to make me fire fight and I just kept throwing it back. I saw it as standing Jane’s [the head] corner and putting ownership back – you know, what have you done about x? I don’t think it made me the easiest guy to work with.

This echoes the state of the dependency the staff were in, perhaps caused by charismatic leadership, focused in the heroic prototype. The other deputy at that time, Diana, said that apart from the head’s leadership the most important factor in moving the school forward was: ‘Without a doubt having stable staff in place. At that point as well we were able to make permanent appointments of many staff’. One member of staff who had been away from the school through illness for almost half a year also gave an interesting insight into teacher capability. She said, commenting on the latter part of 1999: ‘Things seemed to be moving

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forward when I returned. There was a new management team of head and deputies and I felt like a newcomer … we also got extra training with the LEA, and that extra was good for everyone’. CONCLUSION In this chapter, I have looked at Gronn’s observations on the nature of distributed leadership and the intensification of work, by re-examining empirical data from a small-scale case study. The high performer’s drive for excellence, as shown by the leadership of the three heads in the study, did lead to intensification of work that was not desirable in the long term. However, some of the intensification did seem to be necessary, particularly in stage one, in order to raise morale and move forward. Others then had to develop capability in dimensions of their role performance, not just as teachers, but also as leaders. This aligns with Gronn’s characterization of distributed leadership as having to have a finely tuned tolerance for ambiguity. If school leaders are to ‘acquire a sense of how events coalesce, fuse and flow’ (p. 70) then they need to be able to develop synergies within the whole school, so that work intensification does not become a hindrance to distributed leadership practices, but an impetus for them. NOTE 1. All the names in this chapter are pseudonyms.

REFERENCES Bass, B.M. (1990) Bass and Stodgill’s Handbook of Leadership: Theory, Research and Managerial Expectations. New York: Free Press. Bass, B.M. and Avolio, B. (1993) Transformational leadership: a response to critiques, in M.M. Chemers and R. Aymar (eds), Leadership Theory and Research: Perspectives and Directions (pp. 49–90). New York: Academic Press. Conger, J. and Kanungo, R. (1998) Charismatic Leadership in Organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Conger, J.A. (1989) The Charismatic Leader: Behind the Mystique of Exceptional Leadership. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Ferguson, N., Earley, P., Fidler, B. and Ouston, J. (2000) Improving Schools and Inspection: The Self-Inspecting School. London: Paul Chapman Publishing. Conger, J.A. and Kanungo, R.N. (1987) Toward a behavioural theory of chrismatic leadership in organizational settings, Academy of Management, 12, 637–47. Conger, J.A. and Kanungo, R.N. (1988) Conclusion: patterns and trends in studying charismatic leadership, in J.A. Conger and R.N. Kanungo (eds), Charismatic Leadership: The Elusive Factor in Organizational Effectiveness. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Gray, J., Hopkins, D., Reynolds, D., Wilcox, D., Farrell, S. and Jesson, D. (1999) Improving Schools: Performance and Potential. Buckingham: Open University Press. Grint, K. (2000) The Arts of Leadership. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hochschild, A.R. (1983) The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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House, R.J. and Howell, J.M. (1992) Personality and charismatic leadership, Leadership Quarterly, 3, 81–108. Howell, J.M. (1997) Organization contexts: charismatic and exchange leadership. KLSP: Transformational Leadership: Working Papers. College Park, MD: Academy of Leadership Press. Jones, J.C. and Webber, C.F. (2001) Principal succession: a case study. Paper presented to the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Seattle. Law, S. and Glover, D. (1999) Does OFSTED make a difference? Inspection issues and socially deprived schools, in C. Cullingford (ed.), The Inspector Calls. London: Kogan Page. Louis, K.S. and Miles, M.B. (1992) Improving the Urban High School: What Works and Why. London: Cassell. OFSTED (1996) From Failure to Success. London: OFSTED. OFSTED (1999) Lessons Learned from Special Measures. London: OFSTED. Ogawa, R.T. and Bossert, S.T. (1997) Leadership as an organizational quality, in M. Crawford, L. Kydd and C. Riches (eds), Leadership and Teams in Educational Management. Buckingham: Open University Press. Weber, M. (1947) Max Weber: The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, trans A.M. Henderson and T. Parsons. New York: Free Press.

6 From Singular to Plural? Challenging the Orthodoxy of School Leadership ALMA HARRIS AND CHRISTOPHER DAY1

INTRODUCTION Effective school leadership has become a dominant theme in contemporary educational reform. Effective leaders are needed to sustain innovation and are at the heart of capacity building for school improvement (Harris and Lambert, 2003). Research findings from different countries and diverse school contexts have revealed the powerful impact of leadership on processes related to school effectiveness and improvement. (Hopkins, 2000; Jackson, 2000; Van Velzen et al., 1985; West et al., 2000). Of those factors that contribute to effective subject performance and effective schools, leadership takes a prime position (Busher and Harris, 2000; Sammons, 1999). Similarly, in securing enhanced school and student performance, leadership plays a key and vital role (Mitchell and Sackney, 2001; Mortimore, 2000; Southworth, 1995; Stoll and Fink, 1996). The evidence from the international research base is unequivocal – effective leaders exercise an indirect but powerful influence on the effectiveness of the school and on the achievement of students (Leithwood and Jantzi, 2000). Whilst the quality of teaching has a powerful influence upon pupil motivation and achievement, the quality of leadership determines the motivation of teachers and the quality of teaching in the classroom (Fullan, 2001; Sergiovanni, 2001). It is for this reason that ‘leadership’ has generated an enormous amount of interest among researchers and practitioners. A vast literature on school leadership and leadership theory exists (see Hallinger and Heck, 1996). Most of this literature is derived from North American and European sources with, it has been argued, an overreliance upon commercial and business views of leadership (Day et al., 2000). Yet, despite a substantial research base, a singular, overarching theory of leadership has proved to be elusive. While researchers in many countries continue to produce a steady stream of empirical evidence about 89

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school leadership this endless accumulation of findings still has not produced a consensus about effective leadership practice. As Bennis (1993, p. 259) reflected almost a decade ago: ‘Of all the hazy and confounding ideas in social psychology, leadership theory undoubtedly contends for the top nomination. Probably more has been written and less is known about leadership than any other topic in the behavioural sciences’. Little it seems has changed. A major problem with the contemporary leadership literature is the sheer proliferation of leadership theories, styles or approaches that appear there. There seem to be as many versions of school leadership as there are those who write about it. Goddard (Chapter 1, this volume) has identified 14 different styles of leadership with many premised upon the leadership capabilities and capacities of one person. The complex, competing and sometimes contradictory messages within the leadership field only serve to heighten the fact the research findings are not always accessible or helpful to those in schools (Harris, 2003). Constructions and understandings of the term ‘leadership’ vary in subtle and numerous ways. It is difficult to discern how ‘instructional leadership’, ‘learner centred leadership’ and ‘pedagogical leadership’ differ. Do they simply offer alternative labels for the same leadership approaches or are they distinctively different theoretical interpretations or positions? There is also a growing recognition that much of the leadership literature fails to reflect contemporary leadership practice in schools (Morrison, 2002: Owens, 2001; Razik and Swanson, 2001). Traditional notions and models of leadership and organizational change are being disputed and challenged (Foster, 2001; Goleman, 2002; Harris, 2002). Much of the literature omits the importance of the contexts in which people construct social events and share meaning (see Morley and Hosking, Chapter 3, this volume). Also, certain assumptions are reinforced within the literature: first, leaders and followers are not interchangeable; secondly the leadership actions and abilities of one individual are of paramount importance; thirdly, leadership resides in the role of the headteacher or senior management team. It is only relatively recently that the potential of students to be leaders in schools has been acknowledged (Rudduck, 2001) and the importance of networks of shared leadership practice and devolved leadership responsibilities highlighted (Lambert, 1998). In their recent review of successful school improvement efforts, Glickman, Gordon and Ross-Gordon (2001, p. 49) construct a composite list of the characteristics of what they term the ‘improving school’, a ‘school that continues to improve student learning outcomes for all students over time’. At the top of this list appears ‘varied sources of leadership, including teacher leadership’. This work directly challenges assumptions about where leadership is located within a school because it views leadership as agency, a force for change within a school (Day et al., 2000; Riley and Louis, 2001). However, as most of the empirical evidence concerning school leadership has been derived from primarily from headteachers’ accounts and descriptions,

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there are relatively few rich descriptions of alternative models of leadership or accounts of leadership from those who do not occupy designated leadership positions within the school. Hence, the primacy of individual leadership is reinforced and the hierarchical view of leadership firmly maintained. While contemporary studies of successful leadership from the perspective of all stakeholders do exist, they remain somewhat rare (Foster, 2001; MacBeath 1998). Consequently, this chapter outlines the empirical evidence from a study that took a multi-perspective view on successful school leadership. It explored successful school leadership from the perspectives of all stakeholders both within and outside the school. Parents, governors, pupils, teachers, headteachers, deputies and support staff were all involved in the data collection process. The findings from the study provide a contemporary insight into the tensions and dilemmas facing leaders in schools in the twenty-first century. They also point towards the need to ‘challenge the orthodoxy or orthodoxies of school leadership’ in favour of a form of leadership that is inherently reflective, collaborative and shared.

THE RESEARCH In 1999 the National Association of Headteachers (NAHT) in England commissioned research to identify, examine and celebrate good leadership practice in schools. This project became a means of identifying from those ‘closest to the action’ the nature and practice of effective leadership in schools in England. The project aimed to examine how existing theories of effective leadership, ‘purposeful leadership’, ‘transformational’ or ‘moral’ leadership, matched up to the successful leadership practice in times of change. The research involved in-depth case studies at 12 schools and interviews were conducted with parents, pupils, teachers, governors, senior managers and headteachers at each school. A full account of the research methodology and outcomes can be found in NAHT (2000) and Day et al. (2000). The empirical evidence from the study provided a 360-degree perspective on successful leadership in action. It allowed different stakeholders to offer their views on the form and nature of leadership at each school. Inevitably, the head became a focus for discussion as the ‘formal leader’ but it quickly became evident that the approach to leadership adopted by heads was far from autocratic. From the study, it became clear that although heads were viewed as the main leaders and decision-makers within the school, leadership responsibility did not rest solely with them. The heads were considered to be key but not exclusive leaders within the school. The evidence pointed towards a form of leadership that was distributed through collaborative and joint working. These heads had deliberately chosen to distribute leadership responsibility to others and had put in place systems and incentives to ensure this happened. In all cases, they remained important gatekeepers to change and development, guiding their

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schools in a clear and purposeful direction. Their leadership was underpinned by a set of core personal values that included the modelling and promotion of respect (for individuals), fairness and equality, caring for the well-being and the development of students and staff. Their commitment to the development of their staff was reflected in their leadership actions insofar that they decentralized and devolved leadership responsibilities to others. Over the years I have learned that it is impossible for one person to run a school single-handed. I now know that unless teachers take on leadership roles, the school is unlikely to flourish and they are unlikely to develop and grow. (Head2 S1) The head believes in giving teachers and pupils a chance to lead. That doesn’t mean taking over his job – it means taking responsibility for leading new initiatives and leading teams. Most teachers welcome the opportunity. (Teacher S7)

Ever present in the actions of the headteachers in the study was a firm belief in teachers as the key to successful school improvement. There was a strong emphasis upon staff development in order to maximize the potential of all teachers. All the heads in the study vigorously promoted staff development whether through in-service, visits to other schools or peer support schemes. Their principal concerns were maintaining teacher morale and motivation in order to build the capacity for change. It was particularly noticeable that staff development did not only focus upon needs which were of direct benefit to the school, but also those which were of direct benefit to the individual. The heads invested a great deal of time in creating positive working relationships among teachers. Opportunities were provided for teachers to work together, to work across teams and within teams and to take on leadership roles and responsibilities. In one school teachers were asked to take responsibility for writing a whole-school policy, in another they took the lead on a whole-school review of assessment strategies and in another they formed a group responsible for internal change and development. These groupings or teams were always voluntary, permeable and non-permanent. The heads’ stated intention in creating such groupings was to create flexible working arrangements within the school that allowed teachers to lead at different times and for different purposes. In this sense the heads operated a distributed form of leadership as responsibilities were dispersed within the organization. But more importantly there was evidence of what Gronn (2000) calls ‘conjoint agency’, where teachers worked together in partnerships, clusters or formal groups to undertake certain activities that positively affect organizational change and development. ‘Conjoint agency’ is central to building leadership capacity in schools and requires attention to two areas: structures and processes for involvement and opportunities for teachers to become skilful participants in school development (Harris and Lambert, 2003).

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When I first came to this school the teachers looked to me for leadership, they were dependent and in many ways powerless. I’ve tried to change that by providing them with chances to lead and develop their skills and abilities. The dependency culture has shifted as a result, they now need me less which is a good thing. (Head S5) By working together in the assessment team I’ve felt more involved in the school. It has helped me to see that we are all leaders in this school. (Teacher S7)

It was considered important by the heads that teachers were given the time and opportunity to collaborate. Opportunities and new approaches to professional development such as mentoring, coaching and peer review were put in place. Where teaching practices were poor, improvements were achieved through investing in forms of professional development and collaboration that raised teachers’ knowledge base and skills. Providing groups or teams of teachers who had not worked together before with a specific task or an area for improvement resulted in major benefits to the schools and the individuals involved. One of the first things the head did was to set up cross-subject teams so that people had the opportunity to work together outside their subject areas. The problem is that departments can become very insular and you never talk to other teachers or work with anyone else. The cross-subject team changed this and allowed us to work on whole school themes and issues together. (Teacher S4) I am involved in a team that is exploring the issue of pupil access to the curriculum. This feels quite a responsibility but the team seem to be working well together and staff are responsive to the messages because it’s us and not ‘top-down’. (Teacher S9)

It was acknowledged that while this ‘distributed’ approach to leadership was generally desirable, at certain times in a school’s development it was neither feasible nor appropriate. All the heads had adopted autocratic and ‘top-down’ leadership approaches at critical times in their school’s development. However, they all agreed that this leadership approach was least likely to lead to, generate or sustain school improvement. The heads recognized that in order to improve their school they needed to build organizational capacity at a personal and interpersonal level. Hence, whenever possible they sent positive messages to others about their competence and capabilities. They reinforced how much they valued staff and pupils by focusing upon the emotional needs of others through empathy, caring and reassurance. The heads focused their attention primarily upon building relationships with others and encouraging others to take responsibility for making things happen.

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I wanted to change the ‘dependency culture’ that pervaded this school when I arrived. Teachers, pupils and parents expected me to make all the decisions so I involved them wherever I could and delegated whenever I could. (Head S7) I see my leadership as enabling other people to take over, to do things … It’s being able to trust other people. To be confident in your own ability … to delegate tasks and know they will be done … to allow people to do things and not to try and control it all. (Head S10) While the head is the designated leader within this school, we are all leaders and he reinforces this by ensuring we have a voice and some involvement in running the school. (Teacher S6)

The most important aspect of leadership for all the heads concerned working successfully with people. Being a head was not a ‘desk job’, though it involved organizational and administrative tasks. It was centrally concerned with building relationships and encouraging others to lead. The heads in this study adopted highly creative approaches to tackling the complex demands of implementing multiple changes. The decision to work with and through teams as well as individuals was a common response to the management of change. They delegated responsibility and authority to their senior management and to middle-level leaders. In many ways, they demonstrated what Goleman (2002) has described as ‘resonant leadership’, where there is an emphasis on synchrony among those within the group or organization. Goleman (2002, p. 53) suggests that ‘resonance stems from whole sets of co-ordinated activities’ that comprise a particular leadership style where others are invited to take on leadership roles. This position reflects the work of Stoll and Fink (1996) who describe ‘invitational leadership’ as a form of leadership where a high premium is placed upon emotional intelligence and interrelationships with others. The heads in the study used a number of strategies for developing leadership skills in others. These strategies included involving others in decision-making processes, mentoring those in leadership positions and offering a wide range of professional and personal support. From the different vantage points of stakeholders in the study, the heads did reflect many of the facets of invitational and resonant leadership. They quite clearly placed an emphasis upon people rather than systems and invested heavily in staff development. At the core of their leadership practice was a belief in empowering others by allocating real tasks and responsibility for delivery. While the heads emphasized the contingent nature of many of the decisions they made, the central set of democratic values driving their practice did not alter. Their leadership approach was premised not on the basis of

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